Prukalpa Sankar remembers all too nicely the second that the penny started to drop concerning the want for a knowledge enterprise akin to Atlan. “I used to be every week away from delivering a significant venture and the analyst introduced he was quitting,” she recollects. “He was the one one who understood the database; I used to be in tears – I simply didn’t know what to do.”
That have paved the way in which for Sankar to launch Atlan round two-and-a-half years in the past. She and co-founder Varun Banka shared a imaginative and prescient. “Knowledge could be chaos, however work shouldn’t be chaos,” she says. Proper not, too many information groups are working in siloes with one a part of the organisation having little concept what others are doing – or find out how to discover out, not to mention share info.
Atlan’s pitch is deceptively easy. The explosion of information and analytics applied sciences lately has seen each firm, from start-ups to the biggest enterprise, put money into a spread of latest instruments. However until they’ll tie collectively all these instruments – tables, code, fashions, enterprise intelligence dashboards and extra – tasks spiral uncontrolled and fail to ship. The enterprise is unable to unlock the perception it had hoped for.
Sankar and Banka first met at a consultancy specialising in harnessing information for social function. Of their work on tons of of information tasks, usually involving distinguished stakeholders together with authorities ministers, the pair usually discovered themselves getting annoyed. “We have been doing cool tasks, however the work concerned in these tasks was fairly often removed from cool,” she recollects. A lot of their time was spent fixing glitches and issues that may have been easy if there had been a platform by which everybody concerned may collaborate and talk.
Initially developed as an inner venture, Sankar and Banka quickly noticed the business prospects for his or her concept, and Atlan was born. It gives a layer of expertise that sits on prime of a enterprise’s disparate information infrastructure, successfully stitching it collectively by way of Atlan’s means to catalogue the metadata it comprises.
Customers can use the platform to seek for info inside the enterprise’s information and to determine very exactly which information asset is the place courtesy of the cataloging system, whi gives a single supply of the reality. Atlan’s expertise additionally plugs into third-party collaboration and communication instruments so that everybody within the enterprise has entry to the underlying information.
“Metadata is the glue that may bind the fashionable information stack collectively,” Sankar explains. “It’s the layer that can permit more and more numerous, siloed instruments and folks to collaborate successfully.”
That concept has shortly captured the creativeness of shoppers of all styles and sizes, with the Atlan platform already in use with information groups at excessive development corporations and main enterprises together with Plaid, WeWork, Postman, Delhivery, Unilever, and Scripps Well being. Buyer and income numbers elevated 10-fold final yr alone, Sankar says.
Atlan cofounders Prukalpa Sankar and Varun Banka
Atlan
Traders have additionally flocked to the corporate. Final month, Atlan revealed it had raised $50 million of Sequence B fundraising in a spherical led by Salesforce Ventures, Sequoia and Perception. The funding announcement got here solely eight months after the completion of the enterprise’s $16 million Sequence A spherical.
Sankar doesn’t see the purpose in hanging round, pointing to the way in which the cloud computing revolution is offering companies with an enormous new alternative to drive worth from information – if they’ll keep on prime of that information. “We predict that the transfer to the cloud is a kind of once-in-a-lifetime developments, in order that creates a once-in-a-lifetime alternative for a enterprise like Atlan,” she argues. “We simply wish to make the lives of information groups simpler.”
Atlan’s firepower will due to this fact be dedicated to increasing the crew and bettering the product. On the previous, for instance, whereas the corporate now employs greater than 100 folks in its world crew, it has little or no sources devoted to gross sales and advertising and marketing; investing there may drive much more fast development.
As for bettering the product, these are nonetheless early days for this rising subject of the info ecosystem, Sankar says. “We win enterprise as a result of we’re the perfect product in the marketplace, however the information expertise for a lot of organisations continues to be removed from concept and there’s house for lots extra innovation.
