Acryl Data Raises $21M to Accelerate Future of Data Management

Fundraising News
23.06.2023 10:25 am

Acryl Data – the company driving the DataHub Project, the most widely-used open source data catalog – today announced that it has secured $21M in Series A funding led by 8VC with participation from Ram Shriram at Sherpalo Ventures, Guillermo Rauch, founder and CEO of Vercel, and The Chainsmokers’ Mantis VC. The funds will be used to deepen investments in customer success, accelerate development of its cloud offering and extend the vision of its product towards a control plane for data.

This round brings total funding to date to $30M. Acryl is led by co-founders Swaroop Jagadish, CEO, who previously led data platforms at Airbnb, and Shirshanka Das, CTO, who led the DataHub initiative at LinkedIn prior to the company making it open source.

Acryl’s product - Acryl Cloud - is an enterprise-ready data management platform powered by the open source DataHub Project. The team at Acryl leads the DataHub Project and Community with over 7,500 data practitioners, and enables practitioners to collaborate on industry-leading data management capabilities. As an open source control plane and data catalog, DataHub is currently in use by companies including Stripe, Pinterest, and Optum. Acryl Cloud accelerates time to value and adoption journeys for companies where data is critical for business operations. Companies such as Notion, Zendesk, OVO and Depop have embraced Acryl Cloud as their data management solution of choice.

Acryl Cloud is a community-driven data management platform that delivers central controls across the decentralized data stack. With a mission to bring clarity to data, Acryl offers a best-in-class Data Catalog alongside solutions for data governance and observability. It is delivered as a managed service and extends the DataHub Project’s open source capabilities with features that reduce friction in the operational management of data. Today, companies use Acryl Cloud to establish a single source of truth for documentation, enable search and discovery of trusted assets with automated data lineage, and better connect technical teams and non-technical teams across an organization via an automated governance engine.

Companies have used Acryl to better understand and manage data costs - in some cases, reducing monthly expenditures on data warehousing by 25%. Automated data asset classification and impact analysis has enabled teams to identify and retire redundant assets safely, lowering the cost of data storage and computation without incident.

“The explosion of data over the past decade has driven both opportunities and challenges for businesses,” said CTO Shirshanka Das. “Companies embraced various technologies and platforms to store, process, and analyze their data - but now find themselves facing a fragmented data landscape. Siloed datasets, disparate tools, and a lack of unified control has created inefficiencies and hindered collaboration between technical and business teams. Further, the industry has addressed fragmentation with more fragmentation, as governance and observability tools have been unnecessarily separated, leading to inefficient and inconsistent solutions. Through the industry’s first open control plane for data, we have designed Acryl Cloud to take these problems head-on.”

“8VC and Acryl share a vision for the future, in which enterprises can consolidate control of each of the various pieces of their data stack within a single platform, reducing complexity and accelerating innovation,” said Bhaskar Ghosh, CTO at 8VC. “Shirshanka, Swaroop and team are ideally positioned to harness the power of DataHub and solve the hard problems that have historically stood in the way of this vision.”

“The growth of data-driven decision-making has led to an increasingly fragmented data ecosystem,” said Ram Shriram, Founder and Managing Partner, Sherpalo Ventures. “We’re excited to join Acryl in its journey to help organizations manage this new decentralized environment, bringing data teams closer to the business and enabling even casual users to interact directly with data insights. Shirshanka and Swaroop have been at the forefront of these efforts from the beginning, and are well-situated to overcome many of the obstacles that exist in the industry.”