Data collaboration startup Atlan has raised $105 million to continue developing its control plane-based software as demand for AI data readiness and governance skyrockets.
The company has developed software enabling data teams to share data asset information – tables, columns, SQL code, BI dashboards, and data science models – based around metadata for a data stack. It provides a data catalog and data glossary, lineage, governance, and quality information. The metadata is stored in a repository or lakehouse that can be connected to Dremio, Snowflake, Azure, AWS, and other data sources.
Atlan was founded in 2019 by Prokulpa Sankar and Varun Banka. Neither is listed as the company’s CEO and Atlan does not have a leadership webpage. However, our understanding is that Sankar and Banka are serving as co-CEOs. Jim Smittkamp was hired as chief revenue officer in March, coming from Fivetran where he was CRO for almost five years.
The privately-owned company says it achieved almost 3x ARR growth in 2023, and 7x in two years from 2022, with its competitive win rate standing at 75 percent.
The customer list includes Cisco, Autodesk, FOX, News Corp, Nasdaq, Elastic, Zoominfo, Plaid, HubSpot, WeWork, Unilever, and Ralph Lauren. VCs Insight, Sequoia, and Waterbridge are investors along with the founders and CEOs of Snowflake, Looker, Stitch, and DataRobot.
Sankar said in a statement: “Over the past year, boards have consistently asked their CIOs and CDOs about their AI roadmaps, who have realized that the main hurdle isn’t AI models but the lack of AI-ready data – data enriched with business context, trust, and security. Atlan is addressing this by building the control plane for the data and AI stack, integrating trust and context into the digital fabric.”
Atlan says that, as data sets and sources are exploding within disconnected systems and silos, cataloging data so it can be discovered, understood, and utilized across the enterprise becomes a highly manual, cumbersome process. This challenge is exacerbated by AI, where trustworthy and context-rich data has been the greatest barrier for most companies looking to put AI into production.
Its software provides a technology layer that acts as a control plane and collaboration layer on top of a business’s disparate data infrastructure, and aims to stitch it together via cataloged metadata so data and business teams can find, trust, and govern AI-ready data. Atlan centralizes data management, uniting data producers and consumers throughout the organization.
Atlan was positioned as the Top Right Leader in a 2022 Forrester Wave report looking at enterprise data catalogs for Data Ops, and says it’s the fastest company to debut as a leader in a wave category.
The public funding history started with a $2.5 million seed round in 2019 followed by a $16.5 million Series A the same year. There was an extended Series B with $50 million in 2022, and $27.5 million in March this year. Now that has been swiftly followed by a Series C raising $105 million, taking total funding to more than $206 million and giving the business a $750 million valuation.
The Series C was led by GIC, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, along with co-investor Meritech Capital and existing investors Salesforce Ventures and PeakXV Partners.
