- Atlan — a company that improves data management for enterprises — announced it closed $2.5 million in pre-Series A funding led by WaterBridge Ventures
Around five years ago, entrepreneurs Prukalpa Sankar and Varun Banka launched tools for gathering and managing data in order to make life easier for government officials by being able to quickly conduct surveys and maintain digital records that are accessible from anywhere. These tools were launched under a company called SocialCops.
As a result, the Indian government partnered with SocialCops on National Data Platform — which is a project for connecting and bringing more transparency within many of the state-run initiatives — along with a project for delivering subsidized cooking-gas cylinders to poor women across the nation called Ujjwala Yojana.
And then two years ago, the two of them used the tools that they built for their own teams to manage projects also launched a platform to help data teams around the world called Atlan. And Atman has secured more than 200 customers from more than 50 nations.
Atlan has raised $2.5 million in pre-Series A funding led by early-stage venture fund WaterBridge Ventures. And now Atman employs around 80 people and also received backing from Ratan Tata (chairman emeritus of conglomerate Tata Sons), Rajan Anandan (former head of Google Southeast Asia), and 500 Startups. Recently, Atlan — which is headquartered in Singapore — exited out of stealth as well.
Atlan was built on the assumption that the way enterprises deal with data is inefficient. And usually, there is no central system for keeping track of all these data points that often remain in their own silos. As a result, people spend days to figure out what compliance policy. Atlan aims to democratize data inside organizations.
Some of Atlan’s products are called Discovery, Grid, and Workflows. These tools create a collaboration layer, brings together diverse data (from internal and external sources), tools and people to one interface. And Atlan’s Collect product allows organizations to quickly deploy apps to collect granular data. And these apps can collect data even without an Internet connection.
“We are reimagining every human interaction with data. For instance, code has a profile on GitHub — what would a ‘profile’ of data look like? What if you could share data as easily as a Google Sheets link, without worrying about the size or format? Or what would a data versioning and approval workflow look like? What if data scientists could acquire external data within minutes, instead of the months it takes right now?” said Banka via TechCrunch.
With this round of funding, Atlan will invest in product development and sign more customers. Some of Atlan’s customers include Unilever, Milkbasket, Barbeque Nation, WPP and GroupM, Mahindra Group, and InMobi in India; Chuan Lim Construction in Singapore; ServeHaiti in Haiti; Swansea University in the U.K.; the Ministry of Environment in Costa Rica; and Varun Beverages in Zambia.
“With its sharp focus on data democratization, Atlan is well-positioned to reimagine the future of how data teams work,” added WaterBridge Ventures managing partner Manish Kheterpal.
What about SocialCops? SocialCops will also live on as a data science community and will continue pursuing its social good mission.
