Atlan raises $105M at $750M valuation for data and AI governance platform – SiliconANGLE

Atlan Ple. Ltd., a startup that helps companies tackle sprawling datasets for information and artificial intelligence projects, today announced it has raised $105 million in fresh funding.

The Series C round elevated the company’s valuation to $750 million. It was co-led by Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC and Meritech Capital, and joined by existing investors Salesforce Ventures and PeakXV Partners. In total, Atlan has raised more than $206 million.

Atlan’s software platform allows companies to organize large datasets into understandable catalogs for analytics purposes in a centralized control plane with a metadata layer. This centralized interface allows analytics experts to quickly discover patterns in the data that they can use for projects and reveal insights that would otherwise be lost across separate, sprawling systems that a company controls.

Although the hunger for well-categorized data has already existed inside companies for analytics purposes, that has only exploded with the advent of generative AI. When OpenAI’s ChatGPT and its rivals came onto the scene companies began to train AI models using internal company data. However, to get context-rich and accurate responses from generative AI models, data must be carefully categorized and curated.

“Over the past year, boards have consistently asked their CIOs and CDOs about their AI roadmaps, who have realized that the main hurdle isn’t AI models but the lack of AI-ready data — data enriched with business context, trust and security,” said co-founder Prukalpa Sankar. “Atlan is addressing this by building the control plane for the data and AI stack, integrating trust and context into the digital fabric.”

As AI begins to make inroads into the enterprise, the data landscape is changing along with how it’s used and controlled within companies. According to a 2024 Gartner report, more than half of chief data officers and chief analytics officers are increasing AI investments, with an equal number looking into data governance.

A recent CompTIA IT Industry Outlook Report noted that 22% of the firms surveyed are aggressively integrations, AI in their workflows, 33% are proceeding with limited implementations and almost half are still exploring AI tools. 

According to Atlan, the new funding comes at a time when its revenue rose more than seven times in the last two years, off an undisclosed base, with more than 400% enterprise sales growth in the first quarter of 2024, driven by demand for AI data readiness. The company claims enterprise customers such as Cisco Systems Inc., Unilever Plc., Fox Corp., News Corp, Nasdaq and HubSpot Inc.

“Across roles, structures and platforms, no two organizations handle data the same way: For data teams, diverse approaches are a feature, not a bug,” said Atlan co-founder Varun Banka. “So, we built a solution that unifies data across warehouses, lakehouses, vector DBs, BI tools and AI agents. This means data teams can efficiently and effectively collaborate on data that would be otherwise siloed for various use cases, including populating AI models with trustworthy data.”

Atlan is familiar with generative AI and launched an AI copilot in May 2023 called Atlan AI. The tool can provide swift answers to data questions in a conversational interface for data analysts, data stewards and business users. That means it can produce SQL queries for advanced users, draft documents for stewardship, and answer questions about data for non-experts.

“Atlan is setting a new standard for modern data governance, especially for enterprises with a cloud-first data strategy,” said Rob Ward, co-founder of Meritech Capital. “It’s increasingly viewed as the essential data control plane for major business initiatives like AI readiness and data democratization.”

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