Alation Raises $9M in Series A

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.’

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About Alation
Alation was founded in 2012 when leading Ph.D. information retrieval engineers from Google, a designer from Apple and an executive from Oracle teamed up to empower people to easily access the data they need. Customers include some of the world’s largest organizations, with thousands of employees, petabytes of data and thousands of databases. Alation is based in sunny Redwood City, Calif., and funded by Andreessen Horowitz, Bloomberg Beta, Costanoa Venture Capital and Data Collective. For more information, visit alation.com.

About Costanoa Venture Capital
Costanoa Venture Capital is an early stage investor focused on cloud-based services solving real problems for businesses and consumers by leveraging data and analytics. Costanoa provides early stage entrepreneurs with a combination of ‘right-sized’ amounts of capital and value-added support from a high-quality institutional partner. Current investments include: 3scale, Alation, Apptimize, DemandBase, Gamechanger, Grovo, Guardian Analytics, Inflection, Intacct, Kahuna, Lex Machina, NovoEd, Return Path, Risk I/O, StitchLabs, and VictorOps. The firm is headquartered in Palo Alto, CA. For more information, visit http://costanoavc.com, read our blog and follow us on Twitter @costanoavc and @gsands.

About Data Collective
Data Collective (DCVC) is a venture capital firm that invests in early stage companies that are driving a big data and deep compute secular trend as enduring as the PC and networking revolutions of the last 30 years. DCVC and its principals have backed brilliant people changing global-scale industries for over twenty years, helping create tens of billions of dollars of wealth for these entrepreneurs while also making the world a markedly better place. DCVC brings to bear a unique model that unites a team of experienced venture capitalists with more than 35 technology executives and experts (CTOs, CIOs, Chief Scientists, Principal Engineers, Professors at Stanford and Berkeley) with significant tenures at top 100 technology companies and research institutions worldwide. DCVC focuses on seed, Series A, and growth stage companies that apply deep compute, big data and IT infrastructure technologies to transform giant industries. Learn more at dcvc.com and follow us at @dcvc.

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