Data intelligence technology developer Alation has raised $110 million in a Series D round of funding that boosts the company’s market valuation to $1.2 billion.
The new funding round, led by Riverwood Capital, brings the Redwood City, Calif. The funding round included participation from new investors Sanabil Investments and Snowflake Ventures and existing investors Costanoa Ventures, Dell Technologies Capital, Icon Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, Sapphire Ventures and Union Grove Partners. Today businesses and organizations are wrestling with exploding volumes of data and struggling to identify the data they have and manage it.
Alation develops data catalogue software and tools for data governance and data search and discovery that businesses and organizations use to identify and manage their data assets for business intelligence, AI and machine learning tasks and for meeting data regulatory and governance requirements. An initial public offering for Alation is probably still two to three years off, co-founder and CEO Satyen Sangani said in an interview with CRN. Sangani also said:
“We just think we have such a massive market opportunity in building out the data intelligence category and realizing its full vision and capability. There are so many different elements of data – the complexities with data and making it really, really simple is something we could spend the next 20 years on and still have work to do. I think the market is in its infancy. What we’ve got today is a drop in the bucket relative to the market opportunity we see in front of us.”
Data governance and compliance have historically been the biggest use-cases for Alation’s software. But Sangani said demand is also being driven by the need for trusted data for AI and machine learning tasks, for data cloud migration, and for the growing use of data for self-service, data-intensive applications.
“There’s just tons of data moving from on-premises systems to the cloud, workloads and applications moving from on-premises systems to the cloud, and we see that literally every single day. Alation’s strategic alliances with data cloud service provider Snowflake and cloud application vendor Salesforce are catalysts for Alation sales for such tasks.”
Alation is focused on leveraging the new relationship with data cloud service provider Snowflake: The two companies plan “deep product integrations and joint go-to-market initiatives,” Alation said in the announcement of the new funding.
Alation will apply some of the new funding to accelerate research and development efforts for its products, including developing connections to additional data sources and extending its software to the cloud. Some of the new financial resources will be used to continue Alation’s global expansion, including expanding into new vertical markets and establishing relationships with solution providers and ISV partners in EMEA and the Asia-Pacific region.
The company launched its official channel program, the Alation Partner Network, in July 2020 to recruit reseller, systems integrator and technology partners.
