Ratan Tata backed Atlan, a data collaboration platform, recently raised $2.5 million in a Pre-Series A round, led by WaterBridge Ventures – an early-stage venture capital firm based in India.
The platform is founded by the team behind Rajan Anandan (Google Southeast Asia and India vice-president) backed – ‘SocialCop’. Founded in 2012 by Prupkalpa Sankar and Varun Banka, SocialCops was behind the projects including India’s National Data Platform and gas subsidy programme Ujjwala Yojana. The data company was also the part of the international Sustainable Development Goals programme of the United Nations.
While working on SocialCops, Sankar and Banka decided to start up Atlan. The platform is expected to help the teams working on data projects in large enterprises. Atlas brings the internal and external data on an open platform and helps in automating the data driven tasks for businesses.
“Companies are increasingly investing in data as a strategic asset and in setting up in-house data teams. However, they are struggling to overcome the friction that arises when diverse individuals need to collaborate, leading to project failure,” said Manish Kheterpal, managing partner, WaterBridge Ventures.
Rajan Anandan, who quit Google in the beginning of 2019, is also an investor in Atlan. Ratan Tata, Singapore based venture capital firm – Hatcher, US based 500 Startups, family offices such as Bhagchandka family fund, have also invested in Atlan. The latest round of funding is aimed at expanding the project globally and leadership recruitment.
Atlan is based on the model which will ease the issues faced by the enterprises when they use data freely across the teams and function for actionable tasks to make decisions for projects. It will enable the individuals working in the teams to collaborate using data for different projects by creating a collaborative interface resulting in bringing together diverse data points from internal and external sources.
The company stated that they are working on with more than 200 firms around the world including Milkbasket, Barbeque Nation and Unilever amongst others.