For the founders of Atlan, a data governance startup, data has always been at the heart of their work, even before they founded the company. In fact, co-founders Prukalpa Sankar and Varun Banka started building India’s national data platform called SocialCops. So it probably shouldn’t come as a surprise that they’ve developed a data control and collaboration tool that brings together the countless data sources and brings some control over the data chaos in large organizations.
The company was founded in 2020, but the data issue has only grown in importance since then, and today as companies look to leverage their data home to leverage generative AI, it’s even more important. Perhaps that’s why the company announced a $105 million investment on Wednesday at a healthy valuation of $750 million. The startup appears to be in the right place at the right time and solves the right problem – and investors want to benefit from it.
Atlan is based on the assumption that every company’s data ecosystem has inherent complexity. The goal of Atlan is to create order and make people understand that despite the multitude of tools and data storage, it is possible to keep the big picture under control.
“So at Atlan 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 create a single source of truth, essentially a map across your API ecosystem,” Sankar told TechCrunch.
The idea is to build a data structure that helps people understand how data is connected within an organization and makes it easier to collaborate on, search, and troubleshoot data, such as: E.g. a number that doesn’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 ensuring it is accurately delivered to dashboards and made accessible to the employees who need it most.
However, it’s not just good timing that makes the company so much money. ARR has grown 7x in the last two years and 31x in the last three years – considering the company has only been around for four years. The startup also reports that it achieved an 80% success rate in competitive testing in 2023.
While they wouldn’t talk about the number of customers they have, the customers they have acquired include Nasdaq, HubSpot, Elastic, Dr. Martens and Porto Seguro, to name a few.
Atlan currently employs 275 people and is planning to expand given its newfound capital. Although Sankar wasn’t ready to commit to a specific number of new employees, she said they would be 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.