Alation Raises $23 Million in Series B Funding

Redwood City — July 18, 2017 — Alation Inc., the data intelligence company, today announced it has closed a $23 million Series B funding round led by Icon Ventures with participation from Harmony Partners, Costanoa Ventures, and Data Collective. In addition, Michael Mullany, a general partner at Icon Ventures, has joined the Alation board of directors. This round of funding positions the company to scale rapidly to meet enterprise demand for collaborative data catalogs. Alation’s data catalog is the leading choice for chief data officers (CDOs) transforming their organizations into data-driven enterprises.

Recently named the top-ranked solution for data cataloging in Dresner Advisory Services’ Wisdom of Crowds® Data Catalog Market Study, Alation leads the emergence of a new category of data management applications that enable users of self-service analytics to more easily find, understand, and trust their data. Alation’s powerful data cataloging platform combines machine learning and human insight to drive data discovery, curation, and data governance for shorter time to insight and increased data accuracy.

“Traditional data governance, business intelligence tools, and metadata management solutions have failed to meet the self-service data needs of organizations. Only Alation provides the context, flexibility and versatility that modern organizations demand,” said Michael Mullany, general partner, Icon Ventures. “The old data stack is dead, but the new, distributed analytics stack creates data chaos that makes it nearly impossible to tease signal from noise. Alation has emerged to fill that need with a powerful, machine learning-backed platform that provides strategic value to organizations. We are excited to back Alation and this incredibly talented team.”

Alation customers, including the City of San Diego, Tesco, General Electric, Intuit, Pinterest and Pfizer, are using Alation to support emerging use cases:

• Trusted Self-service Analytics: empowering analysts and data scientists to find, understand and trust data.

• Collaborative Information Stewardship: enabling data architects, governors and stewards to easily curate enterprise and departmental data.

• Agile Data Lake Governance: accelerating returns from investments in Big Data.

• Efficient General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance: positioning data protection offices and Chief Privacy Officers to comply with impending regulations.

“Collaborative data catalogs have emerged as a core component of an effective data-driven organization,” said Satyen Sangani, CEO and co-founder, Alation. “Organizations have more access to data than ever while CDOs are looking to get more people to leverage the data in ways that generate value and adhere to proper data governance. Increasingly, CDOs are tackling these data issues with data catalogs at the center of their strategies.”

According to Gartner, “By 2020, organizations that offer users access to a curated catalog of internal and external data will realize twice the business value from analytics investments than those that do not.”* With Alation, organizations are able to increase the speed and frequency of use of analytics without sacrificing accuracy. Machine learning allows Alation to automatically inventory all of an organization’s data and enrich it by cataloging how analysts use it. This foundation drives user-specific applications that proactively recommend data assets for discovery, track lineage of key assets for personally identifiable information and compliance processes, and trigger proactive interventions for adherence to data governance policies.

Learn more about Alation

• Blog post by Michael Mullany, Icon Ventures: “Why Icon Ventures Invested in Alation”

• The Forrester Wave™: Data Governance Stewardship and Discovery, Q2 2017

• Dresner Advisory Services’ 2017 Wisdom of Crowds® Data Catalog Market Study

For more information, please visit alation.com/about.

About Icon Ventures

Based in Palo Alto, CA, Icon Ventures is a specialty venture capital firm focused on leading Series B and C financings. With over $780 million under management, Icon invests with the world’s leading venture firms in companies that are category winners at their earliest stages of momentum. Icon Ventures investments include iconic, market-leading companies such as Aster Data, FireEye, 41st Parameter, Infinera, MoPub, Palo Alto Networks, Proofpoint and Teladoc. For more information visit: iconventures.com.