Our investment in Alation

One of the challenges of the venture business is that sometimes we make an investment in a company that we’re really excited about- and then can’t talk about while it builds initial product and makes early customers happy. While we are only announcing the financing today, Costanoa is thrilled to finally be able to talk about Alation and hint about its contribution to solving the problem of data sprawl in enterprise environments.

One of the things that excites us the most is working with truly great people. This is a founding team that fits us — and each other — so well. Satyen Sangani integrates product leadership for a highly technical product with great go-to market instincts and is a natural draw for great people. He is unequivocally thinking his way through the problem (see The Sales Leader or the Chess Master). Venky Ganti and Feng Niu provide outstanding technical leadership — both the ability to solve really hard problems and to act as Pied Pipers, attracting unique technical talent that wants to work on really hard problems. Finally, it says something about the company that Aaron Kalb is a co-founder and lead designer in a company that’s addressing how to organize and find enterprise data to get to insights faster.

Alation is addressing a huge problem that is only getting worse. For decades, business analysts and SQL developers have struggled to find the right data, figure out what a given field means or what manual adjustments had been made to it. Companies have been trying to solve these problems by creating data warehouses to achieve a “single source of truth” — but to little effect.

I remember looking at solutions for Enterprise Data Integration (search for data) and Master Data Management (wiki for data) over a decade ago. None of those solutions solved the core problem of data access and analyst productivity. Since that time, the scale of enterprise data has increased by an order of magnitude due to more automation, increased sensors, the rapid increase in web and mobile clickstream data, increased compliance requirements, and the ease of spinning up a database.

This is the problem space into which our friends at Alation are wading. We look forward to telling you more soon.