Omni raises $120M Series C at $1.5B to become the semantic layer for AI agents
Omni has raised $120M in a Series C led by ICONIQ Growth, valuing the company at $1.51B. The round marks Omni’s entry into unicorn territory four years after it was founded by former Looker executives Colin Zima , Jamie Davidson , and Chris Merrick . The round includes a $30M employee tender offer.
Omni builds the semantic layer that sits between an enterprise’s raw data and whatever is querying it — whether a dashboard, an analyst, or an AI agent. It defines what metrics mean, who can see what, and how numbers should be calculated. ARR grew nearly fourfold in the past year, and the company hit profitability for the first time in March 2026.
The rise of AI agents is creating an unexpected infrastructure bottleneck. Every agent querying enterprise data needs a governed translation layer underneath it — otherwise the outputs are inconsistent, ungoverned, and unreliable. Zima told Fortune : “AI is an actual advantage for us rather than something ripping the industry apart.”
Customers include BambooHR (serving over 100,000 users through the platform), Checkr, Mercury, and Pendo. The BI software market is worth roughly $47B, with the semantic layer sub-segment projected to grow at 30% annually through 2031.
OpenAI launched Frontier in February 2026, positioning it explicitly as “a semantic layer for the enterprise.” Snowflake and Databricks both have their own semantic layer offerings baked into stacks that 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 it has built from scratch.
Three of Zima and Davidson’s former employer’s biggest competitors are now building versions of what Looker pioneered — and Omni is betting it can outpace them all. ICONIQ partner Matt Jacobson compared Omni’s edge to Snowflake’s early advantage over Amazon’s Redshift: a purpose-built product beating an incumbent’s bolt-on.
The pace of enterprise adoption has changed too. “We’re measuring this in days and weeks now — not months, quarters, or years,” Jacobson told Fortune . With roughly 200 employees across San Francisco, Dublin, and Sydney, Omni is lean for a unicorn — and already profitable.
Sources:
Omni
Fortune
BusinessWire
Image credit:
ICONIQ Growth
J.V.
