For years, companies have poured money into data warehouses, dashboards, and business intelligence tools, only to discover the real problem wasn’t storage or visualization—it was translation.
That disconnect is exactly what Omni was built to bridge, and investors are now betting big that the company has the formula. The company just raised a $120 million Series C led by Iconiq—valuing the startup at $1.51 billion—Fortune learned exclusively. The round comes four years after the company was founded.
Omni builds what’s known as a semantic layer: The governed translation layer that sits between a company’s raw data and whatever or whoever is querying it. Think of it as a living rulebook that defines what revenue means, who can see which numbers, and how key metrics should be calculated. Omni’s customers include BambooHR, Guitar Center, Checkr, Mercury, Pendo, and Heidi AI. BambooHR alone uses Omni to serve more than 100,000 users.
The company’s three co-founders—Colin Zima, Jamie Davidson, and Chris Merrick (all Princeton grads)—reconnected after Google acquired Zima and Davidson’s former employer, Looker, for $2.6 billion in 2020. Zima, who is Omni’s CEO, served as Looker’s chief analytics officer and vice president of product.
Omni isn’t without competition. OpenAI launched Frontier in February, positioning it explicitly as “a semantic layer for the enterprise that all AI coworkers can reference.” Snowflake and Databricks all have their own semantic layer offerings baked into stacks enterprises are already paying for. Omni’s answer to the bundling threat is architectural: legacy players would have to rearchitect their entire products to match what Omni has built from the ground up—a dynamic Iconiq partner, Matt Jacobson, compares to Snowflake’s early advantage over Amazon’s Redshift.
Zima sees the current moment as a genuine inflection point. “It was a latent demand that had always been there,” he told Fortune. “The tools just weren’t ready.” They appear to be now. Omni’s ARR grew nearly fourfold over the past year, and the company hit profitability for the first time last month. It employs roughly 200 people across San Francisco, Dublin, and Sydney.
For Zima, the AI wave is Omni’s tailwind. “AI is an actual advantage for us rather than something ripping the industry apart,” he told Fortune, explaining that as more enterprises deploy AI agents on their data, the more they need a governed semantic layer underneath those agents.
Iconiq’s Jacobson draws a pointed comparison to past platform shifts: “That market opportunity is just enormous. It’s much bigger than business intelligence as we imagined it beforehand,” he said. The BI software market is valued at roughly $47 billion in 2025, with the semantic layer sub-segment projected to grow at 30% annually through 2031, according to Futurum Group.
The pace of enterprise adoption has also shifted: “We’re measuring this in days and weeks now—not months, quarters, or years,” Jacobson told Fortune.
See you tomorrow,
Lily Mae Lazarus
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Email: lily.lazarus@fortune.com
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com