Colin
Zima

Profile

The Second Time Around Is Supposed to Be Harder

Most people who reach the summit once spend the rest of their career explaining it. Colin Zima is not most people. In February 2022, months after Google finalized its $2.6 billion acquisition of Looker - where Zima had spent eight years as an early employee, Chief Analytics Officer, and VP of Product - he walked into another blank document and started again.

The company he built this time is Omni. It is, at its core, a business intelligence platform. But calling it that is like calling the iPhone a phone. Omni is a bet on a specific thesis: that every enterprise interaction with data should flow through a single, governed semantic layer - a structured model of business logic that AI can query in plain English, that analysts can extend in SQL, and that executives can explore without writing a line of code.

By April 2026, Omni had raised $120 million in a Series C led by ICONIQ Growth, valuing the company at $1.5 billion. More striking: the company was already profitable before it took the money. In an era when startups routinely burn through nine figures chasing growth, Omni had cracked the math differently - 4x ARR growth and positive economics simultaneously. The check wasn't a lifeline. It was fuel.

The founding team reads like a Looker reunion. Zima co-founded Omni with Jamie Davidson and Chris Merrick, two executives he had worked alongside closely at Looker. The three brought with them a combined Rolodex of the best BI engineers in the industry and a very specific point of view on what the prior generation of data tools got wrong. Before Omni shipped a single feature, its team already had more than 150 years of combined business intelligence experience.

The strategy - if you want to call it that - was customer obsession as competitive moat. By the time Omni reached 100 employees, Zima had personally visited 75 customer sites. Not Zoom calls. Visits. He was doing what he later called "field CTO-style customer support": sitting with data teams, understanding their actual workflows, watching where the tools failed. It is an uncomfortable thing to scale, which is exactly why most companies stop doing it.

The Looker Blueprint

To understand Zima's approach to Omni, you have to understand what made Looker unusual. At most BI companies of that era, customer success was a cost center - a team that handled tickets and renewed contracts. At Looker, Zima pushed for something different: a high-touch support model where the company's experts sat with customers, understood their business context, and treated every implementation as a chance to learn what the product should do next.

He would later describe this model as "account-based marketing in disguise." Looker's G2 reviews landed in the 99th percentile. Not because the product was perfect - no software is - but because customers felt held. That reputation compounded into deal flow that no ad budget could replicate.

Zima credits one specific cultural practice as "the single biggest thing that made it work" at Looker: the kitchen table model, where the support team sat together physically, sharing context, building a shared understanding of the customer base. Distributed organizations lose that texture. He has tried to preserve it at Omni, even as the company expanded to offices in San Francisco, Dublin, and Sydney.

Before Looker: The Long Road to Domain Mastery

Zima's path to the BI industry is not a straight line. He graduated cum laude from Princeton University in 2006 with a BSE in Operations Research and Financial Engineering - a degree that straddles math, systems design, and economics. His first job was as a Structured Credit Analyst at UBS Investment Bank, where he learned a formative lesson from an early manager: "How you present work matters as much as doing it."

He moved to Google, working on search quality. In 2012, he co-founded PrimaTable with Jamie Davidson - a startup that used demand forecasting to help restaurants fill last-minute seats. HotelTonight acquired PrimaTable that same year. Zima joined as a Data Scientist, leading personalization and demand forecasting work. And then Looker called.

What followed was eight years of compounding expertise. Zima grew with Looker from scrappy startup to Google acquisition, accumulating a depth of understanding about enterprise data workflows that very few people in the world can claim. When Google closed its $2.6 billion acquisition in 2019, he stayed on - then eventually stepped away to build Omni.

He has said that after PrimaTable was acquired, he "truly thought I'd never do it again." That is a sentence worth holding onto. The founding of Omni was not inevitable. It was chosen - deliberately, with full knowledge of the difficulty involved - by someone who had the network, the capital access, and the credibility to do something much easier.