Enterprise IT Startup Alation Secures $23 Million

Alation announced the close of $23 million in Series B financing. Four investors contributed to the round: Icon Ventures, Harmony Partners, Costanoa Venture Capital, and Data Collective.

Alation was founded in 2012 when a designer from Apple, an executive from Oracle, and  leading Ph.D. information retrieval engineers from Google teamed up to empower people easily to access data. The company aims to be the first data catalog built for collaboration.  Analysts who use it are empowered to search, query, and collaborate using their data to achieve faster, more accurate insights. Alation automatically captures the rich contexts of enterprise data, including what the data refers to, who has used it, and the fit between the data and different types of analysis. Alation’s catalog is generated and updated using machine learning and improved through human collaboration between analysts, stewards, experts, and business users.

According to the company, the new funding positions Alation to scale rapidly to meet enterprise demand for collaborative data catalogs.