5 on Funding with Satyen Sangani, Co-Founder and CEO of Alation

Welcome to 5 on Funding! This weekly newsletter asks venture-backed startups 5 detailed ways they plan to use the new funding to scale their companies.

Quick Facts About Alation:

Company Description: Alation is the leader in enterprise data intelligence solutions, enabling self-service analytics, cloud transformation, and data governance. More than 450 enterprises build data culture and improve data-driven decision-making with Alation, including Cisco, Nasdaq, Pfizer, Salesforce, and Virgin Australia. Alation has been named to Inc. Magazine’s Best Workplaces list four times, is a 2022 UK’s Best Workplaces? in tech and Best Workplaces? for Women, and recognized as a 2022 and 2023 UK’s Best Workplaces?.

Industry: Data Intelligence

Amount Raised: $123m

What 5 things will you do with this funding?

Key Priority for Funding: Investing in the product and building a company that can scale

1. Research and development: Do what we already do, but better

“We have more than 450 customers. Whenever I talk to them, I ask one pretty simple question, ‘Do you want us to do more things or do you want us to do what we already do, but better?’ And every single time, they say to me, ‘Do what you already do, but better.’

And what we do is empower everyone in an organization to find, understand, and trust data. Then we drive engagement and adoption with that data, so people can use data more often and more effectively in their work. This builds a data culture – and so that's probably the number one thing that we're focused on.”

2. Research and development: Create new products

“The second thing is new products and services that we are going to build and integrate into our platform. We constantly iterate based on customer needs, so we can give people an experience to have data that addresses whatever they do and whatever their role they're in.”

3. Building an ecosystem?

“Our customers want lots of things from us. And the reality is, we can't build it all. So we partner with a whole bunch of great ISVs, like our data quality partners, and data access partners like Snowflake and Databricks, who are going to do more to help customers achieve their data goals.”

4. Scaling go-to-market internationally

“We have employees all around the world: U.S., EMEA, APAC, and LATAM, and are growing our presence in these markets. We want to put more folks in APAC; India specifically. Putting more folks in EMEA, and Latin America. It's super exciting, but scaling globally is not without its challenges.

When scaling to a different country, the first thing you want is customers. This is software, so you can sell before you land a single foot on the ground. The first thing that we look at is, do we have customers in the territory? Do we have leads in the territory? And do we have people that actually want our technology? And if we can see evidence of actual customers who'll be references and evidence of demand, then we can start landing people on the ground. And the first person is generally a technical resource, not a salesperson. But we follow that person with a sales resource and a legal entity, and a whole bunch of other stuff that allows us to be able to set up the foundation for building into that territory bigger, badder, better.”

5. Putting the infrastructure in place to scale the business

“You can't do any of these things unless you have a company that can scale. So we’re setting up G&A operations.”

About the co-founder: Satyen Sangani is the CEO of Alation and a co-founder. In founding Alation, he aspired to help people dispassionately observe the world around them, empowering them to passionately work to improve it. Before Alation, Satyen spent nearly a decade at Oracle, where he ran the Financial Services Warehousing and Performance Management business. Prior to Oracle, Satyen was an associate with the private investment firm Texas Pacific Group, and an analyst with Morgan Stanley & Co. He holds an MS in economics from the University of Oxford and a bachelor's from Columbia University.