Zurich-based startup Qala AG has raised €1.7 million in pre-seed funding to accelerate development of its platform that helps enterprises gain real-time visibility and governance over their data — directly at the source.
The round was led by QBIT Capital and Haatch, with participation from Backbone Ventures, ROI Ventures, and several SICTIC-affiliated data security and tech angels.
Tackling Data Chaos in the AI Era
As organizations rush to integrate artificial intelligence into their workflows, they’re discovering a fundamental problem: they don’t fully understand the data their systems rely on.
“AI is really forcing enterprises to better understand the data they have and rethink who is trusted with this valuable resource,” said David Scott Turner, co-founder and CEO of Qala. “Governance and compliance simply can’t sit at the edge anymore — it has to be continuous and operate at source. Trustworthy software starts the moment data enters your system.”
Qala’s platform brings observability and compliance “to the left” — embedding governance and security into the earliest stages of data handling. The company says its software provides real-time mapping, classification, lineage tracking, and policy enforcement without disrupting existing development workflows.
A Growing Market for Continuous Compliance
Qala’s pre-seed round comes amid a broader European surge in funding for startups tackling data observability and governance infrastructure.
Recent raises include Sweden’s Rerun (€15.6M Seed) for multimodal data observability in robotics and spatial AI; Lithuania’s nexos.ai (€30M Series A) for AI governance; Germany’s Tanso (€12M Series A) for environmental compliance; and the UK’s Cloudsmith (€21.9M Series B) for software supply chain visibility.
While these companies differ in focus, they share a common goal: helping enterprises maintain continuous, automated control over sprawling data flows and compliance processes. Qala is Switzerland’s first startup in this emerging category — positioning the country as a new player in Europe’s data-governance landscape.
From Payments to Compliance Infrastructure
Qala was founded in 2024 by Turner, Carl Strempel, and Bruno Soares, veterans of highly regulated industries who previously co-founded Imburse Payments, later acquired by a U.S.-based insurance software provider.
Their experience exposed a recurring problem: enterprises waste time and confidence answering the same questions — where data lives, how it’s protected, and who controls it.
“With AI, these questions are more relevant and harder to answer than ever,” said Soares. “We built Qala to make that clarity continuous and automatic. Compliance shouldn’t be a project — it should be a property of your system.”
Making Compliance Continuous
Qala’s platform offers several core capabilities for engineering and compliance teams:
- Live Data Mapping – real-time visualization of data flows and topologies across systems.
- Data Lineage – tracking origins and dependencies across services.
- Automated Classification – identifying sensitive fields and mapping them to regulations like GDPR, DORA, and the EU AI Act.
- Policy Enforcement and Audit Trails – continuously applying guardrails and generating evidence straight from the source.
“Qala makes compliance continuous, automatic, and built into the development lifecycle,” said Basel Sbeini, General Partner at QBIT Capital. “Their timing — as AI pushes data control and governance to the center — gives them a unique advantage to define this new category.”
With this funding, Qala plans to expand its engineering team and pilot its platform with early enterprise customers in the finance, healthcare, and technology sectors.
