Alation, Inc.

About Us

Our goal is to build a delightful and empowering experience for people who are asking really important questions, the answers to which are not on the internet, but rather are locked away in databases and spreadsheets. We're talking about people like the executives at large companies, directors of major universities or non-profits, and leaders in government, who might be asking questions like:

-- "Is my business growing faster in India or in China?",
-- "What’s the last screen users tend to look at before leaving our site and not returning?”,
-- "Is there evidence that certain pollutants cause cancer?", or
-- "How many Nebraskans support funding education with increased sales tax?"

Today, the "interface" for getting answers to such questions is to write an email to an analyst, and wait weeks (if not months) for a response. With Alation, our goal is "English in; answers out." We give users answers in milliseconds (like Google does). And if the question is truly novel and requires human analysis, we want to empower the analyst to produce a report in minutes, not months.

The first to bring a data catalog to market, Alation combines machine learning and human collaboration to bring confidence to data-driven decisions. We do this by leveraging some great ML and AI technology developed by our incredible engineering team (headed by a PhD out of Google, who has filed over 50 patents), but also by gathering knowledge from the knowledgeable people in organizations using clever 'human-computer collaboration' flows, and then empowering knowledge workers and decision makers in organizations to reach their full potential using a suite of dead-simple interfaces and power tools for different constituencies.

Alation has brought together an incredible team of engineers, designers, and executives from Google, Apple, Oracle, IBM, one-man startups and top schools. We have raised $50m from our Series C round of funding. More than 100 organizations, including eBay, Munich Re and Pfizer, leverage the Alation Data Catalog.