Atlan Secures $105 Million to Combat Enterprise 'Data Chaos' with Unified Control Plan

Today based in San Francisco Atlasa startup that strives to bring order to the “data chaos” that businesses face, announced that it has raised $105 million in a Series C funding round.

This investment brings the company's valuation to more than $750 million. The funding was led by Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC and Meritech Capital, with participation from existing investors Salesforce Ventures and PeakXV Partners. Atlan said it will use the capital to further develop its product, which acts as a unified control plane for stitching together disparate data infrastructures, from data platforms like Databricks to CRMs like Salesforce 360.

The company will also use part of the funding to expand its presence and meet the growing demand for data organization in the AI ​​era.

“Over the past year, boards have regularly asked CIOs and CDOs about their AI roadmaps, who have realized that the biggest obstacle is not AI models but lack of AI-ready data, data enriched with business context, trust and security. Atlan solves this problem by creating the control plane for the data and AI stack, embedding trust and context into the digital fabric,” Prukalpa Sankar, co-founder of the company, said in a statement.

Understand Atlan's approach to data processing

Today, data chaos is real. Whether a large conglomerate or a young startup, every company uses dozens of tools across its entire stack and generates huge volumes of structured and unstructured data at different levels. Some of this information is stored on data platforms such as Snowflake, while the rest remains compartmentalized, waiting to be used. According to a Study on the digitalization of the worldthe growth has been such that 80% of the world's data will be stored in businesses by 2025.

Founded in 2020, Atlan brings all this information together in one place, producing a clear picture of data assets with context and relevant collaboration options. Sankar, who started the company with Varun Banka as an internal project for their previous startup, describes it as a “home for data teams”.

“The base layer is what we call a Metadata Lakehouse. We have native connectors to popular data tools and systems that allow us to quickly sync metadata with them… We can collect anything as metadata, including technical things like where the data is located , social metadata about who uses them and how, operational metadata about how they move and are processed until they reach a data consumer in something like a dashboard, and even compliance metadata like if they contain sensitive information,” Sankar told VentureBeat.

Above this base layer is a trust layer that enables access management, data asset analysis, as well as classification and tagging. It comes with custom modules for data discovery, a business metrics glossary, data products and contracts, and no-code data tracing. This helps data and business teams understand the information flowing through the business, research it, and collaborate to solve problems.

“Data engineers can have a visual, detailed lineage graph where they can predict the downstream impact of a change in a data system, and automatically send alerts to business users who will be affected. Sales teams can source reliable data and use data products that have been selected for someone in their role. Meanwhile, data managers can write policies and connect them to data assets so they are automatically alerted only if an asset risks violating a policy they own,” she explained.

Significant growth in recent years

Although relatively young in the data infrastructure space, Atlan appears to have carved out a niche for itself. The company has seen significant enterprise-level adoption, particularly since the rise of the AI ​​generation. Over the past two years, its revenues have increased sevenfold thanks to the arrival of several major clients. This includes notable industry names such as Cisco, Autodesk, Unilever, Ralph Lauren, FOX, News Corp, Nasdaq, NextGen, Plaid and HubSpot.

“As many new customers turn to us to prepare their data for AI, we are also seeing demand from other C-level business initiatives, such as democratizing the use of data within sales teams and providing data products to customers. We are increasingly integrated not just as a catalog/discovery solution, but as a metadata control plane that allows everyone to better leverage data for these use cases,” Sankar noted.

Overall, the company claims its platform can reduce the time data practitioners spend researching and understanding data by up to 95%. Compared to other players in the same space such as Computer science, Cockroaches and Alation, Atlan claims to win three-quarters of the transactions. He also noted that most of these players have a manual approach to collecting metadata, while his proprietary platform focuses on automating everything with a highly configurable rules-based automation tool and the first co-pilot industry AI for metadata creation.

As a next step, Atlan plans to build on this work and involve more companies looking to bring order to their data chaos. Sankar says part of the funding will be used to support the development and integration of key products, while the other part will drive operational expansion to meet current market demand.