TL;DR: We raised $50M led by Salesforce Ventures, Sequoia, and Perception with participation from present traders, valuing us at $450M.
At present’s announcement is surreal.
At Atlan, we started as a knowledge crew ourselves and have been pissed off by how troublesome it was to handle our work. It felt like an uphill climb to share knowledge, doc data, monitor modifications, save work, and extra. We have been envious of our gross sales, advertising and marketing, and engineering groups, who labored in fashionable instruments like Salesforce, Hubspot, and GitHub whereas we toggled between a dozen disconnected, siloed instruments every single day.
Again in 2017, we wrote an inner memo titled “Salesforce for Knowledge Groups”. This memo is when the thought for Atlan began taking form, and it’s what makes at this time’s fundraise announcement with the Salesforce Ventures crew all of the extra particular. ❤️
In our first pitch deck, we shared a daring imaginative and prescient. Salesforce is the house for gross sales groups, GitHub is the house for engineering groups, and Figma is the house for design groups. At Atlan, we needed to be the Residence for Knowledge Groups.
Up to now 18 months, we couldn’t be extra grateful to the superb knowledge groups who’ve trusted us and given us the chance to grow to be their dwelling. My private favourite second of the yr was in a check-in with Larisa Gorokhova, the Senior Director of BI at CSE Insurance coverage, when she mentioned to me, “Atlan isn’t just a knowledge catalog. It’s actually a house for knowledge folks to collaborate, to debate issues, to hitch collectively. It’s a house on your knowledge crew.”
We’re thrilled that we’ve constructed a house the place knowledge groups like to dwell and work every single day, however we all know that’s simply step one.
At present we’re so excited to announce that we’ve closed our Sequence B, a $50 million spherical of funding led by Salesforce Ventures, Sequoia, and Perception. A number of founders within the fashionable knowledge stack additionally participated within the spherical, together with Taylor Brown from Fivetran and Ajeet Singh from ThoughtSpot, in addition to present traders Waterbridge Ventures.
Fundraise bulletins are sometimes boring, so at this time we wish to share what this fundraise actually means to us and what’s subsequent in our journey to maneuver the needle for knowledge groups around the globe.
Supercharging each software and expertise within the fashionable knowledge stack
Whereas the information stack has solved some necessary issues, it’s grow to be more and more chaotic and siloed. The expertise of working with these instruments at this time is basically damaged. Benn Stancil wrote about this and made an open name for the “Trendy Knowledge Expertise”.
Whereas we don’t absolutely know what the way forward for the fashionable knowledge stack holds, we all know that metadata will probably be key to sewing collectively the best knowledge expertise.
Metadata was all the fashion final yr. But all of the hype and debates targeted on metadata architectures, push vs pull, knowledge discovery vs knowledge catalogs, and many others. We imagine these are the improper issues to be specializing in.
We imagine that the following leap ahead within the metadata house won’t come from perfecting the structure. As an alternative, it should come from serving to knowledge groups get actual worth from the gold mine of metadata that’s generated at this time.
We now have nonetheless barely scratched the floor of what metadata can do. Metadata holds the important thing to fixing dozens of issues in our house — allocating compute assets dynamically primarily based on utilization metadata, scoring knowledge well being and insights, purging stale knowledge property, and even dynamic pipeline optimization.
For instance, think about a world the place these conditions are the norm:
- When a knowledge high quality challenge is detected in a supply desk, the system mechanically stops the downstream pipelines to make sure that incorrect knowledge doesn’t make its technique to the dashboard.
- The system leverages previous utilization logs to mechanically tune knowledge pipelines and optimize compute efficiency by shifting hundreds in direction of continuously used knowledge property and optimizing the schedules of knowledge pipeline runs.
We imagine that the answer to that is shifting from at this time’s passive, siloed techniques to actually activating metadata. Consider a Section or Zapier-like expertise the place metadata can create concord throughout instruments and energy good experiences throughout the information stack.
To make this future occur, we have to open up metadata and transfer from augmented knowledge catalogs to “metadata anyplace” orchestration techniques. For the previous yr, we’ve been quietly working in direction of making this new world of energetic metadata a actuality, and we are able to’t wait to indicate you our progress. Keep tuned for some thrilling updates within the close to future. ?
Learn our current book on the third era of knowledge catalogs and the energetic metadata motion.
Constructing the form of firm that we wished we may have partnered with
In our early days at Atlan, we wrote an inner manifesto about what it might take to be the form of firm that we wished we may accomplice with once we have been a knowledge crew ourselves. These rules have pushed nearly all our product and enterprise selections since Day Zero. Considered one of these rules is, “Be a accomplice, not a vendor.”
In a chat with Venkat Gopalan, the Chief Knowledge Officer at Belcorp, we requested, “What shocked you about Atlan?” He replied, “Past the product, it was the crew dedication. I see this as a partner-partner relationship, not a client-vendor relationship. I feel you’re genuinely desirous about investing within the success of a corporation.”
In the identical spirit, Larisa mentioned, “I hope you received’t lose that spirit and dedication to your clients as you develop. I’ve seen that occur loads… I hope you received’t lose that spark.”
We’ve lately heard this sentiment from a lot of our clients — they don’t simply worth our product, but in addition the individuals who include it.
When knowledge groups deliver on Atlan, they’re typically going by a vital transformation. Our champions face the problem of serving to their groups transfer from a reactive “knowledge service” mindset to a proactive “knowledge product” mindset. Whereas know-how is a vital a part of this transition, the way in which {that a} knowledge crew evolves its tradition and rituals is simply as necessary.
In our common espresso chats with our buyer champions, we realized that we frequently have been going past speaking about our product and have requests (although that got here up too! ?). As an alternative, they began asking us about their inner challenges, cultural rituals, and finest practices round setting the fitting processes. We realized that we have been ready so as to add a ton of worth by simply sharing experiments and learnings from different knowledge groups that we work with.
We’ve consciously chosen to be extra than simply the supplier of a product and make investments closely into serving to our clients with tradition enablement. For us, this implies treating our clients’ objectives as our personal. It means going above and past, and doing no matter we are able to to assist them succeed.
Final yr, we began with a small group house for our clients to share frameworks and finest practices. Within the coming yr, you will notice us make investments closely in doing extra to assist drive the information tradition stack ahead — for our clients, but in addition for any knowledge crew trying to work collectively higher.
Giving again to the information group
Our mission at Atlan is to assist knowledge groups do their lives’ finest work, collectively. The primary and most impactful technique to obtain this was by constructing a terrific product. However the product was all the time simply speculated to be one a part of the mission.
All of us within the fashionable knowledge stack have been working collectively to construct one thing higher and enhance knowledge groups’ every day work. Within the early days, one of the simplest ways for us to do that was to be clear about sharing our personal learnings as a knowledge crew. Since then, we’ve realized a lot from our clients and associates within the knowledge world as they tackle this journey, and we’ve been working to make this data overtly accessible for groups all over the place, whether or not they use Atlan or not.
At present this funding permits us to increase our efforts to offer again to the group that has been so supportive of our work.
Within the coming yr, we’ll work to share this info overtly and transparently. We’ll proceed to put money into instructional content material and assets, sponsor meetups and communities, and contribute again to the necessary open-source initiatives and initiatives that we’re obsessed with.
Constructing a tremendous crew of Atlanians around the globe
Whereas the final yr has been a whirlwind of numbers and wins, what we’re most happy with is the superb crew we’ve constructed.
We’re now a crew of over 100 Atlanians unfold throughout 12 nations and 40 cities. Our go-to-market crew stretches throughout the globe, with houses in San Francisco, New York, Guadalajara, London, Manila, Istanbul and Chennai. Our finance and operations crew is in New Delhi and Toronto, whereas our safety crew is in Singapore and Pune. Our product and engineering crew is unfold throughout Bangalore, Windfall, Lagos, and past.
Our crew begins off each assembly with “Good morning, afternoon, and night!” and mechanically is aware of what time it’s in Los Angeles and New Delhi proper now. It’s a bit odd, we admit, however we find it irresistible.
We did this as a result of one in every of our core values is “One Crew”. It doesn’t matter whether or not somebody is from San Francisco or Sao Paulo, whether or not they went to Harvard or a university we’ve by no means heard of, whether or not they’re 18 or 81, whether or not their gender identification is male, feminine, or non-binary… We don’t care about any of this.
At Atlan, all we care about is somebody’s work, as a result of it speaks in a means that phrases by no means can. We love individuals who take satisfaction of their work and do the fitting factor even when nobody is watching. This concentrate on letting anybody, anyplace, be a part of our mission signifies that we’ve been capable of democratize alternative and construct a crew of actually superb Atlanians in each nook of the globe.
This crew retains us all going, even when our nights get longer and our challenges get harder. That’s why we’ve chosen to announce our fundraise not with a video from our traders or clients, however with the trustworthy reactions from our crew once we introduced it internally. It was one in every of our favourite moments to this point, and we’re so excited to share a glimpse of what this announcement truly means to us all.
Try our inner Crew Handbook to be taught extra in regards to the values, rules, and practices that energy our dream crew.
Dreaming with our eyes broad open
The following decade is the last decade of data-driven groups and firms — ones that don’t simply use knowledge, however combine it into each facet of their every day work. Nonetheless, these groups will solely achieve success in the event that they discover a technique to collaborate successfully throughout at this time’s chaotic knowledge silos and data gaps. When the various “people of knowledge” lastly grow to be an actual crew.
At Atlan, our dream is to be the place the place these superb groups dwell and work collectively higher — the place their tech empowers them to do greater than they ever imagined, fairly than holding them again from their objectives.
When a brand new Atlanian joins the crew, they jot down their desires for the longer term in a ritual that we name the “Dream Wall”. Whereas a few of our desires are foolish like our hope for a seashore retreat, most of our desires are in regards to the superb groups that we wish to empower — the information groups that will probably be behind revolutionary human achievements within the subsequent decade like self-driving vehicles, folks on Mars, a treatment for most cancers, and far more.
Whereas there’s an extended technique to go, we get up each morning with the belief and pleasure that we’ve an actual shot. An trustworthy, actual shot at making these desires a actuality. And we’re giving it our all.
—Prukalpa & Varun
We’re all the time on the lookout for dreamers who imagine within the energy of data-driven groups. If this sounds such as you, try our open positions.
