AtScale is a company that enables smarter decision-making by accelerating the flow of data-driven insights. Pulse 2.0 interviewed AtScale CEO and Chairman Chris Lynch to learn more.
Chris Lynch’s Background
Lynch is currently the CEO and Chairman at AtScale, Executive Chairman at Snowplow, and serves on the boards of Tetrascience and Kolide. Lynch said:
“I have been working in the technology industry for more than 30 years. Initially, I worked in networking and infrastructure, but I have spent the past 20 years with a primary focus on big data, AI, and cyber security. Throughout my career, I have been the CEO of 4 strong and successful companies. By strategically securing investments exceeding $300 million, I have successfully been able to return well over $5 billion to investors through IPOs and M&As.”
“Beyond my role as a CEO, I am an active investor, board member, and advisor to dozens of data, AI, and cybersecurity companies. In addition, I take great pride in my philanthropic efforts. As the founder and president of HackReduce and Tech Tackles Cancer, I strive to bring together the technology industry to accomplish big philanthropic goals.”
Formation Of AtScale
How did the idea for AtScale come together? Lynch shared:
“Dave Mariani (AtScale CTO and co-founder) and other co-founders conceived of AtScale after struggling with the scalability of analytics infrastructure at Yahoo. They saw the need to create an alternative to conventional OLAP technologies that could scale and be integrated with the full range of business intelligence and analytics tools. AtScale’s original vision has stayed true while becoming all the more powerful with the rapid shift in enterprise data gravity toward cloud data platforms like Snowflake, Databricks, and Google Cloud.”
Challenges Faced
What challenges did Lynch face in building the company, and has the current macroeconomic climate affected the company? Lynch acknowledged:
“Building venture-backed companies presents a multitude of challenges. It takes constant determination to deliver on product plans, hit sales targets, and establish a strong brand, regardless of the macroeconomic climate. Further, the art of managing spend and taking investments is complicated. As the economy has slowed and public valuations have fallen, it has become imperative for all companies to reevaluate plans.”
“In my role, I actively steer AtScale (alongside other ventures I’m engaged in) towards harnessing economic downturns as occasions for deep introspection on priorities. It is during these challenging times that we make tough choices that preserve optionality, and look for opportunities to leverage the market disruption (e.g. to leverage greater talent availability and continue to hire key roles). By embracing these strategies, our ventures remain agile, adaptable, and poised to seize the opportunities that arise from market turbulence.”
Evolution Of The Data Analytics Industry
In Lynch’s opinion, how has the data analytics industry evolved over time? Lynch noted:
“Although I have been extremely bullish on Big Data and AI for 20 years, I am continually blown away by how fundamental it has become to everyday business operations. Across every industry, the winning teams are better at leveraging data and artificial intelligence to operate more efficiently, outpace their competitors, and innovate faster.”
Perspective On Tech Tackles Cancer
Could you provide some perspective about your experiences with Tech Tackles Cancer? Lynch pointed out:
“Tech Tackles Cancer has grown into an incredible philanthropy project. In the past ten years, we have raised over $3 million for pediatric cancer causes. We just held our first international event in May at Tech Tackles Cancer London. The goal of TTC is threefold:
1.) To raise money for great charities (for instance, One Mission, St. Baldricks, Children with Cancer UK)
2.) To bring the technology community together to do good things.
3.) To teach the next generation of technology executives and entrepreneurs how to incorporate philanthropy into their careers.”
Core Products
What are AtScale’s core products and features? Lynch explained:
“AtScale delivers the industry’s only universal semantic layer designed for seamless data and analytics integration. AtScale’s platform serves as the critical link between data managed on cloud data platforms and data consumers, using business intelligence tools such as Power BI and Tableau), data science tools Jupyter Notebooks and AutoML), as well as various data applications.”
“The semantic layer serves as the central hub for managing consistent business interpretation of data. It plays a crucial role in facilitating standardization, particularly for critical metrics such as revenue calculations and for key business constructs like fiscal quarter definitions. This standardization of business meaning across the organization promotes clarity and alignment with data-driven decision-making. By seamlessly allowing consumers to use the tools of their choice, it also optimizes cost and performance.”
Evolution Of AtScale’s Technology
How has AtScale’s technology evolved since launching? Lynch noted:
“AtScale’s core value proposition has experienced tremendous growth alongside the shift of data to the cloud. One major evolution has been the introduction of AI-oriented services through a utility known as AtScale AI-link. AI-link lets data scientists interact with the semantic layer as they would a feature store. Further, AI-link simplifies the process of publishing model-generated insights (e.g. predictions) to data consumers, leveraging their existing BI infrastructure.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of AtScale’s most significant milestones? Lynch cited:
“We recently issued a press release highlighting AtScale’s most significant milestones including the milestone of “serving one billion analytics queries” from cloud data platforms.”
“This achievement comes amidst a remarkable growth in the volume of queries orchestrated by AtScale on behalf of end-user analytics applications. Over the past 12 months, AtScale’s semantic layer platform recorded a remarkable 256% increase in queried terabytes on cloud data platforms, including Snowflake, Databricks, Google BigQuery, Amazon Redshift, and Microsoft Azure Synapse.”
“The significance of AtScale’s achievement goes beyond serving one billion queries. As stated in the press release by me, Christopher Lynch, Executive Chairman and CEO of AtScale, reflects the growing recognition among leading companies of the criticality of embedding data and AI-augmented analytics into their decision-making processes. AtScale’s semantic layer enables organizations to leverage data assets on powerful cloud data platforms, fostering a data culture that can lead to a competitive advantage.”
“Moreover, the semantic layer category is gaining momentum, with AtScale playing a leading role. AtScale’s recent Semantic Layer Summit drew over 10,000 attendees and reflects the increasing interest in leveraging the semantic layer to scale business intelligence, embed analytics in applications, and harness the value of AI/ML in augmented analytics.”
“AtScale’s commitment to integration and partnerships with top cloud data platforms is evident through its collaborations with Databricks, Snowflake, Google, and Amazon. These partnerships enhance the capabilities of AtScale’s semantic layer solution and provide customers with seamless access to a holistic view of their data.”
“Furthermore, AtScale has invested in its team, expanding its workforce to over 175 employees and upgrading office spaces in Boston and Sofia, Bulgaria. The company continues to attract talent and was recognized as one of the Boston Business Journal’s 2023 Best Places to Work. With key leadership appointments, such as John Langton as Vice President of Worldwide Engineering and Elif Tutuk as Vice President of Product, AtScale is well-positioned to drive innovation and deliver value to its customers.”
Customer Success Stories
Upon asking about customer success stories, Lynch highlighted:
“One of our customers is Tyson Foods, a global organization with over 140,000 employees and a market value exceeding $50 billion. Our collaboration aimed to significantly improve its data analytics capabilities by establishing a universal semantic layer that spanned multiple public clouds. The end result allowed Tyson Foods to process an impressive 21,000 queries per day, each completed in under 10 seconds.”
“Tyson Foods’ challenges in harnessing the power of its vast data resources led the company to seek a solution that could unify their data architecture and drive efficient analytics. AtScale’s expertise in creating semantic layers, combined with our deep understanding of multi-cloud environments, made us the ideal partner for this journey. By implementing our solution, Tyson Foods achieved a unified and efficient data architecture, enabling their teams to access and analyze data seamlessly across various cloud platforms. The universal semantic layer served as a powerful bridge, enabling faster and more accurate data insights at an unprecedented scale.”
“Our collaboration with Tyson Foods exemplifies our commitment to empowering large organizations with the tools and technologies they need to optimize their data analytics processes. By delivering lightning-fast query response times and establishing a comprehensive semantic layer, we helped Tyson Foods unleash the full potential of its data assets, enabling informed decision-making and driving sustainable growth in a highly competitive market.”
Total Addressable Market
What total addressable market (TAM) size is AtScale pursuing? Lynch assessed:
“As the only universal semantic layer for enterprise data teams, AtScale strategically operates at the convergence of four robust and rapidly growing multi-billion dollar markets. These markets, as estimated by industry analysts, include:
1.) Cloud DBMS Market – With a total market size estimated at $39.2 billion, AtScale leverages the power of cloud-based database management systems to provide organizations with seamless and efficient access to their data assets.
2.) Analytics and BI Market – Valued at $19.7 billion, this market encompasses the tools and technologies that enable businesses to extract insights from their data. AtScale’s universal semantic layer empowers organizations to optimize their analytics and business intelligence processes.
3.) Data Science and Machine Learning Market – AtScale capitalizes on the $5.9 billion data science and machine learning market, catering to the needs of data scientists and organizations that rely on advanced analytical techniques. By providing a unified and scalable data foundation, AtScale enables enhanced data science and machine learning workflows.
4.) Data Management Market – Valued at $8.7 billion, the data management market focuses on the effective organization, integration, and governance of data. AtScale’s universal semantic layer facilitates efficient data management by unifying disparate data sources and enabling seamless data access and governance.
By targeting these four substantial markets, AtScale has positioned itself at the forefront of the data and analytics industry, offering a comprehensive solution that addresses the diverse needs of enterprise data teams. As these markets continue to expand and evolve, AtScale is well-positioned to capture significant opportunities and continue its growth in the evolving data landscape.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates AtScale from its competition? Lynch affirmed:
“AtScale stands out from its competition by offering a unique value proposition that addresses the shortcomings of other approaches to semantic layer implementation. While many data management solutions claim to provide a ‘semantic layer,’ AtScale provides distinct advantages that differentiate it from the rest. Our customers typically turn to AtScale after encountering challenges attempting to use the semantic layer in one of two suboptimal ways:
1.) Organizations tried to build a semantic layer internally within their data warehouse or lakehouse using data transformation pipelines. However, this approach is extremely resource intensive and requires a significant investment to build and manage. This inevitably creates a governance nightmare as data engineers struggle to keep pace with evolving business demands.
2.) Another suboptimal approach is building semantic layers within their business intelligence (BI) tools. While this may seem initially appealing, it tends to create semantic silos within the organization. Different business units end up implementing competing versions of semantic layers within the environment they manage, leading to a lack of data consistency across the enterprise.
By contrast, AtScale offers a comprehensive solution that overcomes these limitations. The platform provides a unified and centralized semantic layer, eliminating the need for resource-intensive internal development and avoiding the pitfalls of siloed implementations. With AtScale, organizations can achieve enterprise-wide data consistency, efficient governance, and agility in meeting evolving business demands.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of AtScale’s future company goals? Lynch concluded:
“AtScale is focused on:
1.) Driving Growth-We actively pursue growth opportunities through new customer acquisition while expanding our reach within our Fortune 2000 customer base.
2.) Cloud Data Platform Partnerships-We strive to be a great partner to the cloud data platform providers. By leveraging AtScale, our platform partners can offer their enterprise customers a broader set of services, enabling analytics workloads into their elastic platforms.
3.) Continuous Innovation-AtScale consistently explores and identifies adjacent capabilities that can leverage the platform’s unique position in the technology stack. Examples of initiatives include AI-augmented insights, which enhance decision-making with advanced analytics and cloud-cost management utilities to optimize cloud expenditures.”
