Atlan, a data catalog and data governance company that emerged during the pandemic, raised $105 million in its latest Series C funding round announced this week, bringing the company's valuation to $750 million. Co-founder Prukalpa Sankar said being relentless in tracking metadata while working with the broader data ecosystem is the core secret.
Atlan has developed data catalogs and data governance tools that enable organizations to understand what data they have, where it is located, who has access to it, what they can do with it, and whether it meets quality standards. The company takes a metadata-driven approach and builds a dashboard on top of the organization's "data stack" that can be easily integrated into the everyday tools (PowerBI, Slack, etc.) used by a variety of roles, including data analysts, data scientists, and business people.
Back in 2020, the company was named a "cool vendor" in data operations by Gartner. In 2022, the company outscored all of its larger competitors in Forrester's 2022 Data Operations Enterprise Data Catalog. For the San Francisco, California-based company, it seemed like an overnight success. But in reality, Atlan would never have been where he is today without a lot of trial and error, Sankar said.
Atlan's origins can be traced back to SocialCops, an Indian "social good data" organization co-founded by Sankar and her colleague Varun Banka in 2012. While SocialCops has had many notable successes, such as developing a big data platform used by the Prime Minister of India, the organization has struggled to manage data.
It tried to develop its own tools, but to no avail. I've also tried to purchase a data catalog and data governance tools to process the data, but none of them have been successful. Sankar and Banka persevered and eventually found a way to do it. "The fourth time, we succeeded," she said.
What is the secret to the success of a data catalog/governance tool? Metadata.
"The biggest difference in our approach is activating metadata and bringing it back into the way people work," she said.
The traditional approach is to let each group of users choose their own tool. As a result, data scientists choose their own data catalogs, business people use other tools for data governance, and analysts use another tool for data management. It doesn't work.
"This has led to a proliferation of tools, and fundamentally, all of these people have their DNA in the way they work," she said. This leads to what we call chaos within the organization. ”
With the proliferation of different data management tools, it is becoming increasingly difficult to answer basic questions such as "What does this number really mean?" With the myriad tools that many people use to piece together, trying to trace the lineage of the numbers that appear on the dashboard is nearly impossible.
"We see ourselves as a collaborative control plane at the top of the data stack, building a unified ecosystem for the entire stack," she said. "We've invested a lot of money in the metadata dashboard. Our design is fundamentally open, with a lot of money invested in the automation spectrum across the ecosystem. ”
After SocialCops completed about 200 data projects using the tool, Sankar and Banka decided to spin the tool off and set up their own company.
Today, the company has connectors for a variety of data tools, including data warehouses, data lakes, databases, BI tools, ETL and ELT tools, data orchestration tools, data quality tools, message buses. Enterprise users can scan their environment with Atlan, and the software detects which systems are in place and configures accordingly.
"We have a customer who has 100 million assets across the entire ecosystem, and we automatically connect them," Sankar said. We call it code governance, and we're just embedded in the way they work with their own tools. ”
Over the past few years, Atlan's momentum has grown significantly, with its revenue growing 7x since 2022. The company is home to many of the top companies in verticals, including companies such as Autodesk, Cisco, NASDAQ, Unilever, and Zoominfo.
This week's Series C funding round was $105 million, led by Singapore's sovereign wealth fund GIC, Meritech Capital and Salesforce Ventures. This brings the company's total venture capital investment to $206 million.
Rob Ward, co-founder of Meritech Capital, said in a press release, "Atlan is setting a new standard for modern data governance, especially for those pursuing a cloud-first data strategy. "It's increasingly seen as an essential data control platform for major business initiatives such as AI readiness and data democratization. The data community's passion for Atlan is extraordinary and reminiscent of the most transformative companies. ”
While Atlan is primarily focused on managing structured data, over the past 18 months, it has adapted its offering to manage certain types of unstructured data, and it also manages AI models.
Atlan is helping customers execute data governance strategies using GenAI models. A customer has multiple chatbots for different use cases, such as HR or sales, and needs to ensure that the chatbots are not violating data access policies.
"A customer's data assets may be purchased from LinkedIn. However, there are relevant terms and conditions. For example, payroll data can be used by HR chatbots, while other chatbots definitely don't use it. So now you need to think about what you should be using, connecting to the data asset, connecting to which AI model is using it, or which LLM is using it.
As businesses ramp up their investment in AI, they find that their data is not ready for AI. This provides an opportunity for Atlan, who is keen to help them organize their data.
"The ecosystem is constantly evolving, and our customers are at the forefront of this new world," Sankar said. AI is likely to be the top priority within businesses, and we need to think hard about how we can make it impact the future. ”