Behind the Investment: Atlan – the Future of Modern Data Collaboration

In the past several decades, we have undeniably witnessed a large data revolution. The volume of data generated across industries has skyrocketed. Data teams are on the rise – with increasingly diverse sets of data-centered roles (data analysts, business analysts, data engineers, data scientists, etc.) In addition, fewer and fewer business decisions are made that aren’t ‘data-driven.’

But as the volume of data generated has surged, the data management ecosystem has grown increasingly complex. The more data generators and consumers in an organization, the more challenging it becomes to understand the context around each data asset. And it’s not just data teams that need access to reliable, real-time metrics -- it’s most functions within an organization, from sales and marketing to product and customer success. Given the web of stakeholders who rely on data and the rapidly-evolving dataOps stack, it’s no surprise that only 1 in 3 business leaders trust the quality of their data and that more than 80% of data scientists’ time is spent dealing with poor data quality.

As Prukalpa Sankar, Cofounder of Atlan, will tell you -- it does not have to be this way. When we first met Prukalpa in early 2020, her vision for modernizing + democratizing data management and collaboration immediately resonated. While the concepts of data cataloging and data governance have been around for some time, Sankar explained, it has yet to be tailored to cloud-first data practices (ie. lightweight deployment, agility, and integrations with the latest tools in the modern dataOps stack). Existing solutions serve large enterprises well, but are not well suited to the needs of younger, more agile organizations which are used to slick collaborative experiences via modern software like Slack, Notion and Airtable. That’s why Sankar, and her cofounder Varun Banka started Atlan – a data management and collaboration hub designed specifically for the modern data stack.

Atlan sits on top of a company's data stack (think Snowflake, Tableau, dbt, etc.) and helps provide a single source of truth for information around data assets. In Atlan, each data asset has a unique profile with relevant contextual information -- like what the data asset represents, who manages it, where the data came from, and who uses it most. To drive frictionless collaboration, each asset also has a unique URL so that data teams can refer directly to specific tables and columns wherever they like to communicate – whether on Slack, Teams, or in JIRA tickets.

All teams need a collaboration layer on top of their work -- developers rely on Github to manage collaboration, version control, and code discovery, designers use Figma to do the same for design, and now with the growth in data teams it is time they get their own cloud first solution. Given their strong early traction and robust platform, Atlan is in a unique position to become this central hub for cloud first data teams.

We are thrilled to lead Atlan's $16M Series A and partner with Prukalpa, Varun and the entire Atlan team to drive the future of modern data collaboration.