For the founders of data governance startup Atlan, data has always been at the heart of what they do, even before they started their company. In fact, co-founders Prukalpa Sankar and Varun Banka started building India's national data platform called SocialCops. It's perhaps no surprise, then, that we've developed tools to manage and collaborate data, bring together myriad data sources, and gain some control over data clutter within large organizations.
The company was founded in 2020, and data issues have only grown in importance since then, and even more now as companies look to acquire data houses to leverage generative AI. It has become important. Perhaps that's why the company announced a $105 million investment on Wednesday at a healthy valuation of $750 million. This startup appears to be in the right place at the right time, solving the right problem, and investors are looking to capitalize on that.
Atlan is built on the premise that every organization's data ecosystem has inherent complexity. Atlan's goal is to bring order and help people understand that despite the disparate tools and data repositories, it's possible to see the big picture.
“What we do at Atran is scan the entire data ecosystem. We connect to source systems like Snowflake, Databricks, BI tools, AI LLM models, Salesforce, and more to create a single version of the truth. We create a map of the sources, the entire API ecosystem,” Sankar told TechCrunch.
The idea is to help people understand how data is connected across an organization, making it easier to collaborate on data, search across data, and fix issues like numbers not updating in BI dashboards. The goal is to build a data fabric. in an automated way.
Sankar said companies spend a lot of time understanding the data they have, ensuring that data is accurately delivered to dashboards and accessible to the employees who need it most. He says he is trying to do so.
However, the company did not receive this kind of funding simply due to good timing. Even keeping in mind that the company is only four years old, ARR has grown 7x in the last two years and 31x in the past three years. The startup also reports that he achieved an 80% winning rate in competitive exams in 2023.
They didn't say how many customers they have, but they have clients like Nasdaq, HubSpot, Elastic, Dr. Martens, and Porto Seguro, to name a few.
Atlan currently has 275 employees and plans to expand given the new found capital. Sankar said he was not ready to commit to a specific number of new employees, but that the company is hiring.
Today's round was led by GIC and Meritech Capital, along with existing investors Salesforce Ventures and PeakXV. Previous investors include Insight Partners and Waterbridge Ventures. The company has now raised a total of $206 million.