Functioning Like a “Central Nervous System” for Data and AI, Atlan is Crafting a Future-Proof Trust and Context Layer for Modern Enterprises
Emerging as a fast-growing force in data and AI governance, Atlan announced a $105 million Series C funding round, led by GIC, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, along with co-investor Meritech Capital, early backers of disruptors like Snowflake and Datadog. Existing investors Salesforce Ventures and PeakXV Partners participated in the round, bringing Atlan’s total raised to more than $206 million, including contributions from top institutional investors such as Insight Partners and Waterbridge Ventures.
This new funding comes as Atlan’s revenues ballooned more than 7x in the last 2 years, with a 75% win rate in competitive trials and a whopping 400% enterprise sales growth in Q1 2024, as demand for AI data readiness and governance has skyrocketed. The company’s customer base today includes industry giants like Cisco, Autodesk, Unilever, Ralph Lauren, FOX, News Corp, Nasdaq, NextGen, Plaid, and HubSpot.
“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,” said Prukalpa Sankar, co-founder of Atlan. “Atlan is addressing this by building the control plane for the data and AI stack, integrating trust and context into the digital fabric.”
In today’s AI-forward, data-driven landscape, robust data governance is crucial. Gartner’s 2024 research found that more than half of Chief Data Officers and Chief Analytics Officers are boosting AI investments, with an equal amount focused on enhancing data governance — the two go hand in hand. At the same time, data privacy, data lineage, and data quality are key obstacles hindering generative AI implementations, according to studies from IBM and AWS.
Within every organization, more departments and employees — business and technical alike — are working with data. 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.
Atlan addresses this challenge with its next-generation platform for data and AI governance. It provides a technology layer that acts as a control plane and collaboration layer on top of a business’s disparate data infrastructure, effectively stitching 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.
“Across roles, structures, and platforms, no two organizations handle data the same way: for data teams, diverse approaches are a feature, not a bug,” said Atlan’s co-founder Varun Banka. “So, we built a solution that unifies data across warehouses, lakehouses, vector DBs, BI tools, and AI agents. In doing so, Atlan empowers data teams to leverage the entirety of their data at high velocity and scale by ensuring its quality, accuracy, and governance. This means data teams can efficiently and effectively collaborate on data that would be otherwise siloed for various use cases, including populating AI models with trustworthy data.”
“Data is key for improving customer experiences in the AI era, and Atlan is the only platform that helps us deliver this value to HubSpot customers from day one,” said Ashfaq Mohiuddin, VP, Enterprise Data & AI at HubSpot. “And with the open and extensible foundation, our technical team can build applications and govern our data ecosystem.”
“Atlan is setting a new standard for modern data governance, especially for enterprises with a cloud-first data strategy,” said Rob Ward, co-founder of Meritech Capital and investor in iconic data companies like Snowflake, Looker, and Tableau. “It’s increasingly viewed as the essential data control plane for major business initiatives like AI readiness and data democratization. The enthusiasm within the data community for Atlan is extraordinary, reminiscent of the most transformative companies.”
With its growth and new funding, Atlan is also receiving significant industry recognition, emerging as the leader in the latest Forrester Wave for Enterprise Data Catalogs for DataOps, and a leader in five G2 categories, including data governance, data catalogs, and active metadata management (the sole leader since the category’s inception). This recognition is largely due to Atlan’s innovative ‘active metadata’ approach, which leverages metadata to catalyze action, fostering unprecedented levels of automation and collaboration, positioning Atlan beyond traditional governance tools.
Source: BusinessWire