Alation is the first collaborative data catalog built for collaboration.

Alation uses artificial intelligence and crowdsourcing to help businesses.

^[19]With Alation, analysts are empowered to search, query and collaborate on their data to achieve faster, more accurate insights.

Alation automatically captures the rich context of enterprise data, including what the data describes, 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 data consumers, curators & creators.

Founders

Alation's cofounders hail from diverse backgrounds.

Satyen Sangani, CEO, was at Oracle Corp for 10 years, running the Financial Services Warehousing and Performance Management business.

Venky Ganti, CTO, worked on Microsoft's data quality infrastructure before becoming a Google data scientist.

At Google, Venky worked with fellow cofounder Feng Niu.

Aaron Kalb led design, research, and engineering in the Advanced Development Group at Siri (acquired by Apple Inc.)

Funding

Alation is in its Series A. Alation is funded by Andreessen Horowitz, Bloomberg Beta, Costanoa Venture Capital, Data Collective and General Catalyst Partners.

Customers

Recognition

Alation came out of stealth mode on March 31, 2015.

In August 2015, Alation was recognized as a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer.

In September 2015, Alation was named a Teradata EPIC award winner in the category of "Operation Excellence" for eBay's implementation of Alation's data catalog and governed self-service analytics.

The requirements for the "Operational Excellence" nomination include:

Implementations that have delivered measurable improvements in the organization's operations, such as forecasting or anticipating customer demand; improving inventory management, supply chain visibility or asset monitoring/sensing; or/and increasing sustainable business practices and resource optimization.

In May 2016, Alation was named a Gartner Cool Vendor.

In August 2016, Alation was recognized as one of the top 25 big data companies by Datamation and one of the 50 leading startups in Machine Learning & Artificial intelligence by Startup Big50.

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In September 2016 Alation officially launched in Australia with MIP, which is the top reseller of Alteryx and Tableau.

In October 2016 Alation was recognized in the Constellation Research Data Management ShortList, curated by principal analyst Doug Henschen.

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Partners

Companies who have partnered with Alation include Teradata, Cloudera, Hortonworks, and SAP SE.

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Alation 4.0

In the Alation 4.0 release, the company announced "Alation Connect," a joint feature between IBM and Alation to provide data catalog connectivity to Presto, SparkSQL and IBM Watson.

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