Snowflake, a global data-cloud company, announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Select Star, a leading platform for automated metadata management, data discovery, and governance. Under the terms of the agreement, the Select Star team including founder and CEO Shinji Kim and the company’s full engineering and product staff will join Snowflake and contribute their metadata context platform to enhance Snowflake’s data ecosystem.
Metadata Context: The Next Frontier for AI-Driven Data Intelligence
Since its founding in 2020, Select Star has built a universal metadata model that integrates with more than 25 data sources — from databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL) to BI tools (Tableau, Power BI), data-pipeline/orchestration tools (dbt, Airflow), and more. By capturing not only what data exists, but where it comes from, how it’s used, and which teams depend on it, Select Star has enabled customers to gain unprecedented visibility into their data ecosystems.
“From the beginning, our vision at Select Star has been to make data easier to find, understand, and use. That means not only capturing what data exists, but also where the data comes from, who uses it, and how it’s being used,” said Shinji Kim. “Whether it was simplifying data governance, accelerating self-service analytics, or cutting down the cost of unused data assets, we’ve seen how powerful metadata context can be.”
As AI becomes more deeply embedded in enterprise workflows, the importance of context grows: “A model or agent can only perform as well as the context it has. Without knowing where data originates, how it has been shaped, or which teams depend on it, AI cannot produce reliable results. The foundation of trustworthy AI is trustworthy metadata.”
Select Star’s platform delivering lineage, usage analytics, entity relationships, semantic models, and automated data documentation has already helped organizations transform raw data into trustworthy, usable assets.
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Strategic Rationale: Enhancing Snowflake Horizon Catalog & AI-Native Data Cloud
Snowflake will integrate Select Star’s metadata platform into its own Horizon Catalog, significantly broadening its visibility across an enterprise’s full data estate. This will include data stored outside Snowflake itself, across diverse databases, BI tools, and data pipelines. The result: a unified metadata layer that provides consistent views of lineage, ownership, usage, and relationships across an organization’s entire data ecosystem.
This move strengthens Snowflake’s positioning as the AI-native foundation for enterprises. With metadata context embedded deeply into Horizon Catalog, Snowflake’s AI products including Snowflake Intelligence and Cortex Code will be better equipped to “understand” data, extract insights reliably, and support agentic AI workloads at scale.
“Snowflake knows that the battle for AI workloads will be won in metadata, lineage, and trust, not raw storage,” commented industry analyst Phil Fersht. “Horizon Catalog is a strong foundation, but Select Star brings what Snowflake lacks today: real automated discovery, column-level lineage, usage intelligence, and UX that reduces the grunt work data analysts still do.”
Looking Ahead: Unified Data Governance, Discovery & AI-Ready Intelligence
With the acquisition, Snowflake plans to extend Select Star’s capabilities to all connected systems enabling teams to:
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Discover, catalog, and understand data assets across heterogeneous sources
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Trace data provenance, lineage, and usage across databases, BI tools, warehouses, and pipelines
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Provide a single source of truth for data governance, usage analytics, and AI-ready metadata context
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Reduce time spent stitching data context; instead focus on business insights and AI-driven analytics
The integration aims to help organizations identify the right datasets, avoid redundancy, optimize data storage and pipelines, and accelerate AI-enabled data initiatives.
“We are excited to scale our impact and continue building the kind of data intelligence platform we always envisioned,” said Kim. “I’m deeply grateful to our customers, our team, and our investors for being a part of our journey, and looking forward to what we will create together with Snowflake.”
Source: Select Star
