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Alation secured a funding round of more than €120 million in growth capital. The organization develops data structuring solutions. Ten years after its founding, Alation is valued at about €1.7 billion euros.

The data analytics market is rapidly growing. The more data businesses generate, the greater the demand for data processing tools. Alation successfully rides the trend.

The organization develops a broad portfolio of data processing solutions. Its ‘Data Catalog’ product uses machine learning to take inventory of massive amounts of data, structured or not. As a result, analytics professionals spend less time navigating data and more time processing data.

The organization raised more than €120 million in growth capital in a recent investment round. The largest contributions came from Thoma Bravo, Sanabil Investments and Costanoa Ventures. Databricks participated for the first time. Its investment arm contributed a significant amount. Alation and Databricks are expected to intensify their collaboration — more on that later.

One in four Fortune 100 companies

Alation was founded in 2012. Over the past decade, the organization raised $340 million in growth capital. The company was recently valued at approximately €1.7 billion. Its growth promises to continue for the foreseeable future. More and more organizations need solutions to structure data, and that’s exactly what Alation provides.

Alation plans to use the latest funding round to develop new products for existing customers. Its solutions are used by more than 25 percent of all Fortune 100 companies. Existing customers are an enormous source of revenue.

In addition, the funds are key to paying employees. Alation’s workforce grew by 75 percent in recent months. The organization now employs more than 700 professionals. Labour is anything but cheap.

Databricks and Alation

Databricks invested a significant amount. The organization has never invested in Alation before. Databricks and Alation share more than 100 common customers.

Although organizations’ solutions overlap, it would be wrong to call the two competitors. For instance, while Databricks helps customers deploy cloud infrastructure for data storage, Alation primarily focuses on processing stored data.

The two have been collaborating for some time. Among other things, joint customers can use Alation’s technology to automatically take inventory of data in Databricks Delta Lake storage locations.

With the investment, Databricks shows a willingness to intensify its partnership with Alation. The partners revealed that they’ll be working on new integrations and joint solutions for data engineering, data science and analytics in the coming period.

Tip: 50 percent of your data will soon come from the Edge