Atlan hits $450M valuation after new $50M funding led by Salesforce Ventures, Sequoia to build a collaboration hub for data teams

Today, enterprise data is spread across both structured databases and unstructured data sources like documents, files, emails and even on user devices. As such, making sense out of these data poses many challenges to organizations and data teams.

That’s why New York-based tech startup Atlan is on a mission to provide a modern data workspace (like GitHub for engineering or Figma for design) to help data teams collaborate and democratize their enterprise data while automating repetitive tasks.

Atlan was incubated while building the world’s largest government data lake – India’s national data platform. Its tools allowed users to connect 42 databases across 25 national ministries in a record 12 months — the fastest deployment of its type globally.

Today, Atlan announced it has closed a $50M Series B round led by Insight Partners, Salesforce Ventures, and Sequoia Capital India. Several founders in the data space participated in the round including Fivetran founder Taylor Brown and ThoughtSpot founder Ajeet Singh.

The latest investment, which gives Atlan a post-money valuation of $450 million, comes just eight months after a $16M Series A led by Insight Partners and high profile angels like Bob Muglia, former CEO of Snowflake.

Atlan creates a unified discovery and collaboration experience, bringing context and trust to the entire modern data stack. “Today, data assets are not just tables, but code, models, BI dashboards, and pipelines,” said Prukalpa Sankar, Co-Founder of Atlan. “Metadata is the glue that can bind the modern data stack together, the layer that will allow increasingly diverse, siloed tools and people to collaborate effectively.”

“Data and analytics are mission-critical to navigating rapidly-changing circumstances — informing decisions, seeing opportunities, and navigating change,” said Alex Kayyal, Managing Partner of Salesforce Ventures. “As businesses embrace a digital-first environment, their need for informed, data-driven collaboration will only intensify. We believe Atlan’s deep integration ecosystem and unified product make them the leader in bringing the future of collaboration to data teams.” Salesforce Ventures has also invested in leading companies shaping the modern data and analytics platform including Airbyte, dbt labs, Monte Carlo, Snowflake, and Starburst Data.

Founded in 2018 by Prukalpa Sankar and Varun Banka,  Atlan enables teams to create a single source of truth for all their data assets and collaborate across the modern data stack through deep integrations with collaboration tools like Slack, data warehouses like Snowflake and Redshift, BI tools like Looker, Sisense, and Tableau, data science tools, and more. A pioneer in the space, Atlan was recognized by Gartner as a Cool Vendor in DataOps, as one of the top three companies globally.

By acting as a virtual hub for data assets ranging from tables and dashboards to models & code, Atlan enables teams to create a single source of truth for all their data assets, and collaborate across the modern data stack through deep integrations with tools like Slack, BI tools, data science tools and more.

Atlan started out as an internal project at data for good firm SocialCops and was incubated across over 200 data projects, including India’s National Data Platform used by the Prime Minister. Since emerging from stealth, it has reported impressive growth numbers, with both its customers and ARR growing 10x in 2021.

“Traditionally, tooling in the space has focused on collecting metadata but has failed in helping customers actually drive value from metadata,” said Varun Banka, Co-Founder of Atlan. “We are pioneering a new generation of metadata: going from passive, siloed data catalogs to active metadata platforms that can improve every tool in the data stack.”

Atlan is currently used by data teams at high-growth companies and major enterprises like Plaid, WeWork, Postman, Delhivery, Unilever, and Scripps Health. “Atlan isn’t just a data catalog. It really is a home for our data people to collaborate, to discuss things, to work together,” said Larisa Gorokhova, Senior Director of Business Intelligence at CSE Insurance Group.

“Sequoia Capital India has been a part of Atlan’s journey since its early days since it was part of Surge’s third cohort, and the team couldn’t be happier with the progress,” said Tejeshwi Sharma, Managing Director of Sequoia India. “Atlan has emerged as a global leader in its category. The strength of the product and execution is validated by strong customer traction in a short span of time. Every Atlan customer we spoke to attested to the pace of product development and relentless focus on customer delight.”

“In every interaction with the Atlan team, their commitment to excellence shines through and it is clear to us that they are building a world-class company. We couldn’t be more excited to double down,” said Teddie Wardi, Managing Director at Insight Partners.

Today, Atlan is a distributed, global team of over 100 people spread across 12 countries, including the US, India, UK, Canada, Nigeria, Singapore, and the Philippines. It plans to use this funding to expand its current team across all functions and accelerate its go-to-market strategy. It also plans to facilitate an ESOP buyback of up to $1.5 million.