Foundational, a data and AI governance platform, has announced the general availability of Foundational IQ, a new conversational and agentic interface designed to automate and enhance governance across enterprise data estates. The platform leverages a proprietary data graph and integrates with existing large language models.
Built on the Foundational Data Graph, Foundational IQ utilizes context retrieved from every layer of an enterprise’s data estate. This includes application and operational layers where business logic is defined, transformation pipelines, legacy systems, and AI workloads across various programming languages such as SQL, Python, Java, Scala, and COBOL, up to the point of final data consumption. Foundational IQ operates natively within the enterprise’s existing large language models (LLMs), including Snowflake, Databricks, and AWS, ensuring that AI workflows execute within established security and privacy boundaries without data leaving the enterprise’s infrastructure.
Historically, enterprise data governance has relied on manual efforts and consulting projects. Recent regulatory requirements, such as BCBS 239, HIPAA, and the UK FBD, in addition to existing mandates like GDPR, SOX, and DORA, now necessitate detailed tracing and lineage documentation down to individual field or record levels. Reconstructing this information often takes weeks, involving multiple teams and systems with no guarantee of completeness. Furthermore, AI deployments frequently encounter delays because compliance teams struggle to verify data origins or transformation processes. These challenges are not merely process failures but rather consequences of inherent governance gaps in traditional tools, which previously required manual compensation.
Foundational IQ functions as an agent system built upon a deterministic data flow graph, providing a unified interface capable of answering questions, generating reports, pushing production code, and running both templated and custom agents within the enterprise’s LLMs and security perimeters. It operates in two modes: “Fast mode” for immediate lookups and “Thinking mode” for complex, multi-step analysis. Every response generated by Foundational IQ is grounded in the organization’s actual business logic and is fully verifiable, accompanied by references, code, and context to enable teams to validate answers and take confident action.
Foundational IQ is designed to enhance governance and data engineering workflows in areas where AI previously lacked sufficient context or failed to meet necessary accuracy standards. It can automate various governance tasks across the enterprise, including complete source-to-target lineage audit reports, code generation for database migrations, and PII classification. Projects that previously demanded weeks or months of manual work can now be completed in hours, or even minutes.
Alon Nafta, CEO of Foundational, stated, “We are combining two key elements in Foundational IQ that I believe are the key to enterprise scale. The first is our deterministic lineage engine, which now supports practically every coding language out there. And the second is unparalleled context. Foundational IQ knows the organization’s specific business logic, because it has read the code, understood the organization’s data flows, and mapped the full estate through the Foundational Data Graph. That specificity is what makes governance actionable rather than directional.”
Foundational is a next-generation data and AI governance platform that provides deep code-level visibility and active control across the full enterprise stack and development lifecycle. Unlike traditional governance tools that are typically limited to SQL and metadata, Foundational analyzes source code, programming languages, transformation pipelines, legacy systems, and AI workloads to identify where business logic is defined. The platform delivers complete source-to-target, cross-platform lineage, proactively prevents data incidents, tracks sensitive data for compliance and privacy, governs AI with explainable lineage from source-to-model, accelerates migrations and modernization efforts, and embeds governance as an automated control layer within engineering workflows.
Foundational IQ is generally available today as part of the Foundational platform. Additional information can be found at foundational.io/product/foundational-iq.
