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For the founders of Atlan, a data governance startup, data has always been at the heart of what they do, even before they launched the company. In fact, co-founders Prukalpa Sankar and Varun Banka got their start building India’s national data platform called SocialCops. So it probably shouldn’t come as a surprise that they have developed a tool for controlling and collaborating around data, pulling together the myriad of data sources and bringing some control to the data chaos inside large organizations.
The company was founded in 2020, but the data problem has only grown in importance since then, and today, as companies try to get their data house in order to take advantage of generative AI, it’s even more paramount. Perhaps that’s why the company announced a $105 million investment on a healthy $750 million valuation on Wednesday. The startup seemingly finds itself in the right place at the right time, solving the right problem – and investors are looking to take advantage.
Atlan is built on the premise that there is an inherent complexity in every organization’s data ecosystem. Atlan’s goal is to bring order to it and help people understand that even though there are a variety of tools and data repositories, it’s possible to get a grip on the big picture.
“So what we do at Atlan is we scan your entire data ecosystem. We connect to Snowflake and Databricks, your BI tools, your AI LLM models and your source systems like Salesforce, and we create a single source of truth, essentially a map across your API ecosystem,” Sankar told TechCrunch.
The idea is to build a data fabric that helps people understand how data connects across an organization, and to make it easier to collaborate around data, search across it and fix problems, such as a number that won’t update in a BI dashboard, in an automated way.
Sankar says companies spend too much time trying to understand the data they have, while trying to make sure it’s being delivered to dashboards accurately and making it accessible to the employees who need it most.
The company is not getting this kind of money purely based on good timing, though. It grew ARR 7x in the last 2 years, 31x in the last 3 years – keeping in mind the company has only been around for 4 years. The startup also reports that it achieved an 80% win rate in competitive trials in 2023.
While they wouldn’t discuss the number of customers they have, customer wins include Nasdaq, HubSpot, Elastic, Dr. Martens and Porto Seguro, to name a few.
Atlan currently has 275 employees, with plans to expand given the newly found capital. Although Sankar wasn’t ready to commit to a specific number of new employees, she said they are hiring.
Today’s round was led by GIC and Meritech Capital along with existing investors Salesforce Ventures and PeakXV. Prior investors include Insight Partners and Waterbridge Ventures. The company has now raised a total of $206 million.
