Alation Raises $9M in Series A Funding Led By Costanoa Venture Capital & DCVC

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. – March 4, 2015 – Alation today announced $9 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Costanoa Venture Capital and Data Collective, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Bloomberg Beta and General Catalyst Partners. Alation is also backed by notable individual investors including Dave Kellogg, Steve Papa and Naval Ravikant. Additionally Greg Sands, founder and managing partner of Costanoa Venture Capital, has joined the company’s board of directors. The funding will be used to accelerate product development and to scale sales and marketing.

While enterprises and government agencies have made massive investments in data and analytics, they still need to hire teams of consultants, data scientists and business analysts to obtain timely insights into the business. Alation was founded in 2012 to make data more accessible to everyone across an organization.

“Organizations still struggle with quickly finding, understanding and using the right data,” said Satyen Sangani, co-founder and CEO of Alation. “Data-driven enterprises have voracious appetites for information and continue to make massive investments in data management platforms like Hadoop and business intelligence software like Tableau. While these technologies help with computation, storage, and visualization, ironically they make it harder to navigate the ocean of data. Alation helps people get to key insights faster.” Alation’s customers include some of the world’s largest data-driven organizations, with tens of thousands of employees, which manage petabytes of data and thousands of databases. Alation plans to release its product for general availability in the first half of 2015.

“Alation has pulled together some of the best and brightest from Apple, Google and Oracle, a team that is uniquely equipped to ‘fix’ the chaos and complexity that’s the hallmark of enterprise data,” said Greg Sands. “Alation will change how companies think about and interact with their data. We are thrilled to lead the Series A funding because we believe this company has the potential to re- imagine the future of how people consume and manage data.”

“The challenge of corralling data for better business decisions has been attacked in many different ways, but the problem persists as data is only growing bigger, more unruly and more difficult to manage. Simply stated, enterprise data is a mess,” said Matt Ocko, co-managing partner and co-founder at Data Collective. “Alation is coming at just the right time – and with exactly the right people – to help enterprises grapple with chaotic, siloed data and the business knowledge trapped in the data. Watch this space, because things are about to get a lot more interesting.”