Atlan raised a ~800Cr round in a deep funding winter as it looked to cement its place as the leader for data collaboration globally. 

From SocialCops to National Impact

Prukalpa Sankar was living the great Indian dream in 2012. 

She was about to complete her engineering degree from Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University and had secured internships at ExxonMobil and Goldman Sachs.  Varun Banka was part of the same batch at NTU, and the two met on a bus ride to college. 

They shared a common interest in startups and were keen on making a dent in the universe. Frequently collaborating on startup ideas, they would spend days exploring the development space in college. 

Their life was about to change, and it would truly be for the greater good. 

During the Microsoft Imagine Cup in April of that year, Sankar and Banka ideated SocialCops. The goal was to aid decision-making by using Big Data to tackle data gathering and analysis. 

After securing runners-up in the competition, the duo turned their idea into reality and returned to India to build SocialCops. They would launch their official website in October, only 6 months after the initial prototype. 

SocialCops connected citizens to governments via a mobile app and crowd-sourced information and feedback on public infrastructure. They also offered low-cost solutions to non-profits who aimed to conduct surveys on various topics. 

Their pilot project involved crowd-sourcing cleanliness scores for the streets of Delhi’s municipal ward number 103. After two months of gathering data, they identified the cleanest streets in the area and the best municipal cleaners. 

Another project was undertaken in Banka’s hometown of Ranchi, which had seen increased crime levels at night due to broken street lights. After a movement on the SocialCops platform, the town’s government committed a budget of INR 2 crore to install over 2,000 street lights.

After a series of successful projects, SocialCops would raise a seed funding in 2014 of $320,000. By 2017, they were tackling problems at a much larger scale. 

SocialCops became the data intelligence partner for India’s Ujjwala Yojana, impacting the lives of over 80 million women below the poverty line. 

They would also build DISHA, India’s data hub for over 20 sectors and 40 ministries, providing live and dynamic data for every village in the country.

SocialCops was well on its way to becoming everything data for India, but they were only getting started.

Harnessing Harmony in Data

SocialCops began solving problems related to data discovery, access, and knowledge management.

The team began seeing huge gains in operational efficiency. They successfully automated their processes to launch new products in 50% less time and using only 33% less resources than earlier.

This led to a broader question. Could they enable the same operational gains in data teams worldwide? Through market research, Sankar and Banka unearthed two findings, presenting them with a huge opportunity.

They understood that people in enterprises deal with data in a broken and inefficient manner. 

There was never a central system to keep track of data across a company, which often remained in their silos. People would spend days figuring out where and from which to fetch the required data.

Companies also experienced friction when diverse individuals worked on projects. The emergence of Slack and Zoom proved that enterprise collaboration tools were in demand. 

Even data teams were some of the most diverse in organisations, comprising individuals with varied yet complementary skills. 

Machine learning engineers and scientists poured through data warehouses to clean, sort, and present it. Analysts and business managers tried to make sense of it and take action.  

Their goal was simple: build a solution to help organisations democratise data. In simple terms, it enables every stakeholder to access the right data, at the right time and right format. 

After 18 months in stealth, the team ran beta tests to validate their ideas and gauge the value added in global teams. Their new offering meant immortal.

Atlan was born.

To ensure they were solving the correct problems, Atlan conducted over 150 interviews with data practitioners. These interviews focused on understanding potential users' pain points and urgency, not just the product itself. 

This approach allowed Atlan to identify segments with the highest urgency and growth potential, refining their ideal customer profile (ICP) accurately and confidently.

From these interviews, the common issues emerged, which were the initial hypothesis for building Atlan: data being operated in silos, offering limited actionable insights. 

In response, Atlan transformed its product from simple data catalogues to active metadata platforms, addressing critical challenges like data quality, pipeline optimization, and dynamic resource management. 

This innovation was driven by empathy, stemming from the founders' firsthand experience with data challenges, allowing them to create solutions that directly addressed user pain points.

Atlan's decision to remain a horizontal SaaS platform meant their product could be implemented across various industries. The decision would be a game changer. 

Data Unity Worldwide

This flexibility attracted a diverse client base. 

High-growth startups and large enterprises used it, facilitating rapid scaling and adaptation to different market needs. This approach contributed significantly to Atlan's robust growth and widespread adoption. 

Unlike other SaaS firms focusing on a particular segment, Atlan went broad. To support this growth, Atlan expanded globally, growing its team across 12 countries. 

Leveraging diverse talent pools and understanding different cultural contexts allowed Atlan to tailor its solutions effectively to meet regional needs. 

This global presence enabled Atlan to capture a larger share of the data management market, provide localized support, and quickly adapt to regional trends and changes.

In 2019, they would announce Atlan as a collaboration tool for data teams to work with all their data—tables, dashboards, pipelines, and external tools. Their product suite would initially consist of four offerings that greatly simplify organisations' data management processes. 

Collect allowed users to gather high-quality data from internal or external sources. Grid would then curate this data from multiple sources and transform it into actionable insights across industries.  

Discovery aided in breaking down silos between teams allowing for easy access to data. Workflows enabled users to automate repetitive tasks to optimise daily workflows for employees.

Atlan had ensured that potential customers would have a set of tools to get them started instantly from the moment they were out there. 

There would be no more floundering around workplaces trying to figure out where to source their data and how to make sense of it. 

Atlan was ready to democratise data from the get-go. Clients derived substantial value from Atlan's platform. 

Postman solved its data-discovery problems by implementing Atlan's pre-built data workspace. This allowed them to catalogue and document all their data, creating a single source of truth. 

With multiple permissions, everyone could access the data without constantly messaging the data team. This led to consistent data usage, rebuilding trust in their data, and ensuring everyone discussed the same numbers.

Atlan looked set to take off as it pulled the trigger to scale. 

Data Fuels Success

Atlan would hit the ground flying. 

An early FMCG client would claim that they added an astonishing INR 100 Cr in revenue in a single quarter by integrating the company's internal data and the external village-level data made available by Atlan. 

They would also marvel at a significant reduction in time to market for a major project, at only three months, which would have otherwise taken two years. 

Only because they had access to the data at their fingertips. 

Other early customers claimed that Atlan’s DataOps-led approach helped their teams become 6 times as agile and improved their time-to-insight by 60 times. 

Atlan quickly became a valuable resource for data teams around the globe to get context about data. 

They would power entire organisations to analyse data and make data-backed decisions coherently and seamlessly. 

In just two quarters of 2019, Atlan would report 16X growth. Unsurprisingly, they will raise seed funding of $2.5M in July 2019. 

By this time, Atlan had already partnered with data teams in 200 organisations across 50 countries, and companies all over were seeing success like never before. Late-stage startups like Postman and Delhivery and larger organisations like Juniper and Unilever had all come aboard.

The funding would help Atlan heavily scale its product and engineering teams in their mission to pioneer India’s new wave of startups building products and services from India for the world.

Soon after, they launched Atlan's “Grid,” an API that lets companies deeply understand their customers or geographies in minutes, breaking them down by affluence, demographics, distances to PoIs, and everything else. 

Targeted business decisions and better ROIs were right around the horizon. In 2020, Atlan was featured in Analytics India Magazine (AIM)’s 10 emerging data and analytics startups.

Incredible for an Indian team, they were slowly creating a gold standard for data. The opportunity was incredible. 

Managing Data for the World

Every company uses data and needs to make data-oriented decisions. 

Atlan empowered data teams worldwide by providing robust tools that unlock the full potential of their data. It was used in many industries, such as technology companies, financial services, retail/CPG, healthcare, business services, and other verticals.

Specifically, Atlan focused on metadata management, which is managing data about data. 

The global metadata management tools market size was valued at USD 6.7B in 2021 and is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 20.8% from 2022 to 2030. 

Multiple factors were driving the growth of the processes of metadata management tools. The increasing necessity for centralised data administration. The growing value of metadata management in data security. The growing requirement for more excellent data quality and trustworthy analytics. 

Companies' starting also fuels market growth to see the value of avoiding data chaos. As the FMCG company saw, this would result in productivity improvement and indirect revenue increases. 

They invest more in growth, increasing the market size. 

North America accounted for the largest revenue share, 34%, in 2021. The leading share is attributable to most organisations and vendors with extensive regional operations and client bases.

As an early adopter of technology and with established economic structures, North America has witnessed the extensive implementation of cloud-based security applications, primarily among large businesses. Most organisations consider data governance deployments and management highly effective.

Understanding the importance of North America, Atlan started building from the US and got marquee logos like Nasdaq as its early customers. 

Getting a name like Nasdaq helped them get into many Fortune 500 companies, as they could trust a service provider who could solve the complex data problems that Nasdaq faced. Investors could see the market's high potential and Atlan's strong traction in it.

After two years of raising a seed round and delivering impressive growth, Atlan secured its Series A fundraising of $16 million.

The question was how it would make money. 

The SaaS Element

Atlan offers Subscription as a Service (SaaS) to large enterprises.

Atlan focuses on selling to the data science teams within these organisations. While the end decision-makers may involve many stakeholders, the Chief Data Officer and CEO buy-in is critical before a deal can be closed.

Like other Enterprise SaaS companies, Atlan signs annual contracts with these customers and then renews them every year or so. That’s why two important metrics—ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) and Net Revenue Retention (NRR)—show the company's financial health.

For FY22, Atlan registered operational revenue of INR 32 crore, or $4 million, which grew by over 189% to INR 94 crore, or $12 million, in FY23. This growth indicates that by 2022, Atlan had crossed a critical ARR milestone of $10 million and was growing well.

The growth rate was impressive, but market traction was also due to Atlan's strong economic unit and profitability. For any SaaS company, there are four major cost items.

Most SaaS companies have employees in sales, success, research and development, and other support functions like finance. The goal is to develop and sell software and ensure customers use their services effectively, leading to higher retention.

For Atlan, by 2023, this number was close to 200 employees, leading to employee benefit expenses of Rs 41 crore, which has grown by 182% over the last year.

Software costs, which in companies like Atlan can be considered similar to the COGS of any retail brand, as SaaS companies need many cloud capabilities for their products to work, accounted for 24 Cr of its expenses. 

For Atlan, marketing and advertising are just 4% of the expenses as they cater to enterprise customers, a high-touchpoint process. Most customer acquisition costs are classified as sales team costs or events costs. These cost heads might be found in other expenses.

This led to a PAT of INR 7.74 crore for Atlan and allowed it to scale the business and go after the vast market that would explode with the adoption of AI, for which data is the most crucial block. Investors noticed

Atlan raised a Series-B round of funding in 2022, totaling $50 million and valuing the company at nearly USD 450M.

Data Unsiloed

Like every industry player facing competition in a growing sector, Atlan was no exception. 

However, Atlan used two core strategies to compete effectively in the category. A key differentiator was Atlan’s focus on user experience. 

They developed the data asset profile feature, which provides 360-degree visibility into a company’s data ecosystem. 

This tool includes embedded collaboration, making it easy for users to request access to data assets. 

For instance, approving or rejecting a data access request is as simple as getting a Slack message. Every data asset in Atlan has a unique URL and hashtag, making it easily referenceable across various platforms like BI tools, Slack, and Jira​.

Simple is effective. This approach minimises the learning curve for users. 

Instead of requiring users to adapt to a new tool, Atlan’s platform adapts to the tools that users are already familiar with. This enhanced user satisfaction and increased productivity by up to 30%, as users can work seamlessly without extensive training​.

Atlan’s other strategy focused on integrating with platforms familiar to decision-makers. For data management, they partnered with Snowflake and AWS. 

Integrating with Snowflake enabled direct data access and queries, enhancing management. The partnership ensured streamlined governance, secure access, and detailed analytics. 

Leveraging Snowflake, Atlan simplified data management and optimized performance, helping teams maintain a single source of truth for quick, data-driven decisions. Before launching their new product version with Snowflake, Atlan had 14 proofs-of-concept lined up, validating their choice. 

Similar to Snowflake, Atlan chose AWS for cloud infrastructure. Despite initially building some infrastructure for Azure, the traction from AWS led them to focus exclusively on it."

The founders' core motivation for these strategic decisions was their firsthand experience with the problems they aimed to solve.

This gave them a unique perspective and deep understanding of user needs. They developed a scalable solution, showing a founder-market solid fit. This alignment between expertise and market needs helped Atlan compete effectively. 

This fit attracted investors, and in 2023, Atlan raised $27.5M, providing resources for further growth and innovation.

Atlan’s winning recipe? Superior user experience and strategic integrations. With these strategies, Atlan didn’t just compete—they conquered. 

Success was in the data. Rare for an Indian company, they had become the gold standard for data cataloguing in data ops. 

Rising Above Giants with DataOps

In a remarkably short period, Atlan emerged as the leading choice for DataOps.

In a Forrester survey, the company received the highest possible scores in 17 critical criteria out of 26, setting it apart from industry giants like Google, Oracle, and Microsoft.

The impressive accolades are reflected in Atlan's financial performance. The company’s topline growth surged by 7x over two years, and its win rate was 80%, a testament to its increasing market dominance.

How does a newly formed company compete and win against these giants? Customer focus, focusing on simple yet powerful features and building in a niche nobody was focusing on helped. 

In 2023, Atlan introduced Tag-management. A feature which enables data teams to ensure that they can confidently identify sensitive data across their data stack and protect it with the right access controls while serving trusted data to data consumers

It followed up by launching Atlan AI, a first-ever co-pilot for all humans of data. Their execution continued to be at a high standard. 

Strong growth trajectory, leadership position and an inclusive growth approach have helped Atlan attract marquee investors.

In May 2024, Atlan secured a new round of funding amounting to USD 105 million, with participation from existing investors. This latest infusion of capital increased Atlan’s valuation to USD 750 million, up from USD 450 million two years prior. 

Atlan’s claim of 7x revenue from 2 years ago implies it is likely at 210 Cr or ~$30M revenue. This indicates the company’s valuation is ~25x its trailing revenue, assuming 2.5x growth and 10x forward 12-month revenue. 

In a market where most struggled to raise, and the multiple is at ~6x, Atlan’s valuation is rich. Its strong growth, market leadership, and finding a pole position to build for a new emerging world could explain its higher valuation. 

With this financing, Atlan could now look at winning in the AI world.

Leading the AI Data Revolution

The AI revolution is underway.

To be ready to ride the wave, leaders across industries are assessing their capabilities to adopt AI solutions and building the roadmap.

But there is a big hurdle, and it's not the dearth of AI models but rather the lack of AI-ready data – data enriched with business context, trust and security.

Atlan is bridging this gap. They have already launched their AI co-pilot, one of the first for data teams.

The demand for data-ready companies will surge, presenting Atlan with numerous opportunities to expand and innovate. Future advancements in AI will drive deeper automation, simplifying data integration, analysis, and purification, while cloud computing will enable real-time data processing and insights.

AI is one of the many possibilities. Sectors like mobility, cyber-security, and telecom are undergoing transformational changes, and meta-data management will also be the need of the hour in those sectors.

In this golden age of data, Atlan is in a strong position. 

It already leads in the data management space. After almost a decade of building patiently, Atlan finds itself amid an extreme demand for high-quality data.

As the world looks for companies to help them, they will first visit Atlan. In India, SaaS is expected to be a “copy” of what is happening in the US. Yet, here is a company leading in a space that itself is emerging. 

Atlan signals the emergence of a new wave of Indian SaaS companies that are now becoming gold standards globally. Along with Postman, which is also a customer, Atlan could inspire entrepreneurs to build at the edge.

As the $190B AI market explodes, Atlan looks set to be the standard providing visibility into the plumbing that powers it.

Writing: Abhinay, Ajeet, Parth, Raghav and Aviral Design: Abhinav and Chandan