Alation

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Alation was founded in 2012 by Satyen Sangani, Aaron Kalb, Feng Nui, and Venky Ganti. Alation co-founders Satyen Sangani and Aaron Kalb arrived at the solution from two different perspectives. Sangani had a background in economics and had worked as an executive at Oracle. He knew data users in large companies struggled to find and trust data; he theorized that machine learning could be used to help them. Kalb had experience in symbolic systems and had worked on Siri at Apple. He thought crowdsourcing could be used to solve the challenge. In 2012, the team combined those two ideas to create Alation. Its first solution, a data querying system powered by natural language processing, helped define the modern data catalog. The tool was designed to catalog data in an organization and make that data more accessible to more people. This concept is generally termed data democratization. As the company improved the solution, it eased the building of complex queries with collaboration features, enabled data catalog efforts, and integrated with different data and related technology products, such as Snowflake, Tableau, Databricks, and others.

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In early March 2015, the company announced it had raised $9 million in a Series A round led by Costanoa Ventures and Data Collective. Later that month, it emerged from “stealth mode” to launch its data catalog product. In June 2021, Alation announced it had raised a series D funding round of $110 million, led by Riverwood Capital, with participation from Sanabil Investments and Snowflake Ventures, as well as existing investors Costanoa Ventures, Dell Technologies Capital, Salesforce Ventures, and Sapphire Ventures. This latest investment round valued the company at $1.2 billion, making it an industry unicorn. In November 2022, Alation announced it has raised $123 million in a Series E financing led by Thoma Bravo, Sanabil Investments, and Costanoa Ventures, with participation from new investor, Databricks Ventures. Existing and other investors that also participated include Dell Technologies Capital, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Icon Ventures, Queensland Investment Corporation, Riverwood Capital, Salesforce Ventures, Sapphire Ventures, and Union Grove.

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Alation is headquartered in Redwood City, CA. The company also has offices in London, U.K. and Chennai, India, and a presence in over 25 countries. As of November 2022, the company had over 700 global employees, an increase of 75% in less than 12 months.