Data Collaboration Platform Atlan Bags $16 Mn In Series A

Data collaboration platform Atlan has raised $16 Mn in its Series A round led by Insight Partners, with participation from existing investors Sequoia Capital India’s accelerator programme Surge and Waterbridge Ventures. As a part of the investment, Insight Managing Director Teddie Wardi will join Atlan’s board of directors.

Several angel investors have participated in the round, including former CEO of Snowflake Bob Muglia, Stitch’s founder Bob Moore and Jake Stein, Safegraph and Liveramp’s founder Auren Hoffman as well as Notion’s COO Akshay Kothari.

The company plans to use the funding to expand its current team strength in product, engineering and marketing verticals, and double its team size by the end of the year.

“We are excited to partner with Insight as their significant expertise in backing ScaleUp SaaS companies will help accelerate our growth. We will be investing heavily in growing our product & engineering team in India and take 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,”  Atlan’s cofounder Varun Banka said.

Atlan was founded in 2018 by Prukalpa Sankar and Varun Banka, who had previously founded a social data intelligence platform SocialCops in 2012. SocialCops worked with government projects such as the National Data Platform and Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana gas subsidy scheme. Atlan started out as an internal project at SocialCops and was incubated across 200+ data projects.

Atlan claims to help teams in large enterprises collaborate smoothly when working on data projects, as it brings all data assets – data, dashboards, code, models to one unified collaboration workspace. The core model of the company is that while businesses have invested in data teams and are using data as an asset, there are a lot of collaboration issues when it comes to using data freely across teams and functions.

The company lets individuals across teams in the workplace collaborate using data for various projects by creating a collaborative interface, bringing together diverse data assets from tools like Snowflake, Tableau and Looker to one common space. Though the company has not revealed its latest clientele. According to a previous report published in 2019, the company works with more than 200 firms across the globe, including Unilever, Milkbasket, Barbeque Nation, WPP and GroupM.

“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. Atlan is bringing a truly collaborative approach to the modern data stack, leading the way like Figma did for design teams or Github did for engineering teams. We are thrilled to welcome Atlan to Insight and advise the team on operations, go-to-market, and product development,” Insight Partners’ Wardi, who will be joining Atlan’s board, said.

Prior to this, Atlan had raised $2.5 Mn in its pre-Series A funding round led by WaterBridge Ventures, along with US-based 500 Startups, Singapore’s Hatcher, Bhagchandka family fund, Sequoia India chief Rajan Anandan. The funding was used for expansion into the US market and setting up teams across the US, Philippines, Nigeria and India, the company’s cofounder Prukalpa Sankartold Inc42.

Sankar further added, “We launched the free trial of the product close to six months ago and since then we have grown about 16X. Nearly 70% of Atlan’s user base is in the US.”

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