Data collaboration workspace start-up Atlan has raised $16 million in a Series A funding round led by venture capital and private equity firm, Insight Partners. Existing investors Sequoia Capital India’s Surge, Waterbridge Ventures, as well as angel investors like former Snowflake CEO Bob Muglia, Stitch founders Bob Moore and Jake Stein, Safegraph CEO Auren Hoffman, and Notion COO Akshay Kothari also participated in the round.
According to Atlan, the “Github for engineering teams,” the proceeds from the fundraiser will be used to expand its current team and strengthen its product, engineering, and marketing functions in India. The company also plans to double its team strength this year. As a part of the transaction, Insight managing director Teddie Wardi will join the three-year-old Atlan’s board of directors.
“As the modern data stack becomes mainstream, a collaborative layer that acts as a glue across a variety of tools like Snowflake, Databricks, BI tools, and AI/ML applications, is becoming a necessity,” said Wardi.
Atlan, founded in 2018 as an internal project at social data intelligence platform SocialCops, today has expanded to the US, Singapore, Nigeria, and the Philippines, with 70% of its staff in India. It has been incubated across more than 200 data projects, including India’s National Data Platform, DISHA, and its data collaboration platform unifies the data assets of a business, helping them to collaborate smoothly across the data stack through integrations with tools like Slack, data warehouses like Snowflake, Redshift, BI tools like Looker, and other data science tools.
Prukalpa Sankar, Atlan co-founder, said, “At Atlan, we are reimagining the human experience with data — why can’t data assets be shared as easily as sharing a link on Google Docs, or if Google Analytics can tell you the usage on a website, why can’t we do the same for our data?”
Atlan was recently recognized as a Gartner Cool Vendor 2020 in DataOps and became one of the top three companies globally to make it to the list. More than 60% of its clients are in the US. They include prominent names such as Unilever, Scripps Health, Postman, Techstyle, and a diverse portfolio of brands including Fabletics, Savage X Fenty, JustFab, FabKids, and ShoeDazzle.
The last two quarters have been beneficial for Atlan, with the start-up growing by 16 times.
Varun Banka, Atlan co-founder, announced their excitement at working with Insight, since the latter is known for backing SaaS companies, and will help accelerate Atlan’s growth. The start-up would also be taking “great pride in pioneering a new wave of companies in India that are building world-class products, from India for the rest of the world,” he said.
