AtScale raises funding round led by Snowflake Ventures – News

Data management provider AtScale Inc. today announced that it has closed a funding round led by Snowflake Inc.’s venture capital arm.

The company didn’t specify the size of the deal, saying only that it’s the largest equity investment it has received to date. That indicates the round is worth more than $50 million, the amount AtScale raised through its second largest funding round in 2018. The software maker also counts Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley and other institutional investors as backers.

Dave Vellante, chief analyst at theCUBE Research, News’s sister market research firm, speculated that the round was likely $75 million to $100 million and implies a valuation of $500 million to $750 million. “I would estimate Snowflake took about a 10% equity stake in the company,” said Vellante.

Different applications store information in different formats. For example, one database might keep information about potential buyers in a column titled “prospects” while another might use a column titled “leads.” Such inconsistencies can make it difficult to query records. 

Boston-based AtScale provides a software platform that enables companies to create a so-called universal semantic layer. That’s a uniform definition of how information should be organized across an organization’s systems. It avoids consistencies such as database columns that store the same information under different names, which avoids the associated technical issues.

AtScale’s platform creates standard definitions of not only data structures but also calculations. A retailer, for example, could create a rule that specifies analysts shouldn’t take discounts into account when calculating a store’s gross sales. From there, AtScale can ensure that gross sales are calculated in the specified manner across all the retailer’s analytics tools.

The platform includes optimizations that speed up queries. In many cases, querying a dataset requires moving it from the system where it’s usually kept to a dedicated analytics environment. AtScale skips that step and runs calculations on the platform where data is stored.

One of the data platforms that AtScale supports is Snowflake. Using the company’s semantic layer, organizations can make data from Snowflake available in Microsoft Corp.’s Power BI business intelligence tool and Excel. AtScale says its platform optimizes query performance while ensuring the datasets workers are using comply with their company’s semantic layer. 

“What I see is spreadsheets aren’t going away. BI tools aren’t going away. There’s over a billion active users of Excel,” AtScale Chief Executive Officer Chris Lynch (pictured) said in a recent interview on News Media’s theCUBE. “That said, people are broadening how they’re going to access data and analytics.”

Vellante said Snowflake might be interested in AtScale because the startup has a “good footprint” with Microsoft Corp. users, so it provides Snowflake a potential route to handling the data for the large base of Excel and PowerBI users. As well, Vellante speculated that this may bring AtScale into the Open Semantic Interchange initiative, where AtScale has been a missing participant.

Following the investment, the company will collaborate with Snowflake on initiatives designed to ease joint customers’ analytics projects. In a blog post, AtScale founder and Chief Technology Officer Dave Mariani stressed that the software maker will continue supporting competing data platforms such as Databricks and Google BigQuery. 

Photo: News