Snowflake Acquires Metadata Platform Select Star to Boost AI-Driven Data Discovery

Snowflake announced its acquisition of metadata platform Select Star, marking a major step in enhancing its Horizon Catalog with intelligent data context for AI and analytics.

Select Star, founded by CEO Shinji Kim, brings tools that track where data comes from, how it's used, and by whom — turning raw data into rich, usable context.

This detailed metadata layer will be deeply integrated into Snowflake’s Horizon Catalog, helping AI agents better understand an organization’s data relationships, lineage, and usage.

"Select Star's integrations with database systems like PostgreSQL and MySQL, business intelligence tools like Tableau and Power BI, and data pipeline/orchestration tools like dbt and Airflow will help us expand Horizon Catalog’s view of an enterprise’s data estate. This broader context will help agentic AI experiences like Snowflake Intelligence and Cortex Code deeply understand an enterprise’s data and how to extract insight from it," Snowflake said in a blog post.

"Joining Snowflake gives us the opportunity to bring that vision to a much larger stage. We’ll be focused on bringing Select Star’s lineage and discovery capabilities into Snowflake Horizon Catalog and strengthening the metadata layer that agentic AI depends on," Kim said in a social media post.

Snowflake plans to embed Select Star’s lineage and data discovery capabilities into Horizon Catalog, which powers its AI-first offerings like Snowflake Intelligence and Cortex Code.

With over 25 existing integrations, the metadata model will give companies a unified view of ownership, usage, and relationships across their data ecosystem.