AI cannot make a defensible decision without business context

Large enterprises have spent years distributing data across core systems, data lakes, warehouses, applications and cloud environments. A human analyst can sometimes compensate for the differences between those sources because they know what a customer, policy or transaction means in their part of the business. An AI system cannot rely on that unwritten context. If definitions conflict or lineage is missing, the model may produce an answer that nobody can explain to a regulator, a board or a customer.

That is especially difficult in banking, insurance, energy and the public sector. These organisations need more than access to data. They need common business meaning, continuous governance and a record of how each input became a decision.

A semantic control plane over the existing data estate

Stratio connects to an organisation’s existing data systems and adds a governed semantic layer above them. The platform maps technical fields to business concepts and relationships, creating a shared language that can be used by analytics, applications and AI agents. Data can remain in its existing environment while access policies, quality rules and lineage are applied consistently through the control plane.

This architecture allows a company to define an entity or rule once and reuse it across different systems and use cases. A governed data product carries its meaning, quality status, access policy and history with it. AI applications built on top inherit those controls, giving the organisation a traceable record of the data, model and authorisation behind an output.

Decision intelligence for regulated industries

Stratio now describes its platform as decision intelligence software. Customers use the same foundation for work including regulatory reporting, portfolio migration, operational intelligence, forecasting and next best action. The product can run on premises, in a customer’s cloud environment or as software as a service, allowing regulated buyers to choose where data, models and metadata reside.

Stratio’s European origin has also influenced the product design. Its platform supports requirements linked to GDPR, DORA, NIS2 and the EU AI Act, with governance, policy enforcement and auditability built into the architecture. For customers handling sensitive or sovereign data, jurisdiction and deployment are product decisions rather than contractual footnotes.

Built in Madrid and expanding internationally

Óscar Méndez and Ernesto Funes founded Stratio in Madrid in 2014 after building enterprise technology businesses together. The company expanded from big data engineering into data fabric, generative AI and its current decision intelligence platform. It works with enterprises and public administrations across the European Union, the United Kingdom and Latin America. Rodrigo Sepúlveda Schulz became Chief Executive Officer in 2024 to lead the next stage of international growth, and he is supported by leaders across product and technology, revenue, customer delivery, services and finance.

Backing Stratio from Series A to growth

We first met the Stratio team in 2014 and led its €4 million Series A. We partnered again in 2018 to lead a €13 million Series B as the company increased the share of product revenue and prepared to scale internationally. In 2022, Stratio raised a €65 million Series C led by InfraVia Growth, with participation from Adara and the founders. That round supported expansion in Europe and continued development of the platform for regulated industries.

Why we backed Stratio

Stratio has kept returning to the same hard problem as the technology around it has changed: enterprise data cannot support important decisions until it has consistent meaning and governance. The company has built that context into an infrastructure layer that works across existing systems and can now support AI agents as well as human users. We believe regulated organisations will adopt AI through platforms that make every decision explainable, traceable and controllable. That is why Stratio remains one of the clearest examples of our Trusted AI Infrastructure thesis.