Alation Boosts Data Intelligence Platform Capabilities With Lyngo Analytics Acquisition

The addition of Lyngo Analytics’ machine learning and natural language processing technology will expand the audience for Alation’s data catalog and search and discovery tools to a wider audience of business users.

Alation has acquired Lyngo Analytics, a startup developer of AI-based data intelligence software that will help Alation market its data intelligence software for a wider audience of business users and develop new big data applications.

In addition to obtaining Lyngo Analytics’ machine learning and natural language processing technology, the startup’s co-founder and CEO Jennifer Wu and CTO and co-founder Joachim Rahmfeld have joined Alation, Wu as senior director of product management and Rahmfeld as senior director of AI/ML research.

“We’re bringing in some real deep domain experience that is going to really help us accelerate our ambitions in the data intelligence space,” said Raj Gossain, Alation’s chief product officer, in an interview with CRN.

[Related: Alation Launches Inaugural Channel Program Offering Expanded Training, Certification Opportunities]

Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed. The deal is Alation’s first acquisition.

Lyngo Analytics, based in Los Altos, Calif., was in stealth startup mode while it developed natural language processing technology to help business users discover data and insights by asking questions using simple, familiar business terms, rather than developing SQL queries.

“They have some very unique machine learning and natural language processing technology that we saw could be extremely complementary to our data intelligence platform,” Gossain said. “Machine learning has been core to Alation’s position, differentiation, from the get-go.”

Alation, headquartered in Redwood City, Calif., develops data catalog software and tools for data governance and data search and discovery – all under the “data intelligence” description – that businesses and organizations use to identify and manage their data assets for business intelligence, AI and machine learning tasks, and for meeting data regulatory and governance requirements.

Alation plans to add the Lyngo Analytics technology to its own data intelligence platform, making it easier for a broader range of non-technical business users to use the company’s software, including the search and discovery capabilities in its data catalog application, “to explore and access data by simply asking questions,” Gossain said.

That integration work is slated to last into 2022.

“This will expand the [Alation] value proposition to business users,” Gossain said. “Our mission is to help our customers create a data culture.”

The Lyngo Analytics software also will be the foundation for new Alation products. “We see their technology potentially helping us launch some new applications,” he said, declining to say more about those plans.

Alation’s go-to-market partners, including resellers and systems integrators, will also benefit from the acquisition, according to Gossain. The addition of Lyngo Analytics’ technology to the Alation platform will broaden the number of potential users within a customer organization and grow the base of prospective customers. And in the future partners will have a larger portfolio of Alation software to sell.

“Anything that expands the set of use cases that our customers can leverage Alation for and expands the number of users in an enterprise that can benefit from using Alation is music to a channel partner’s ears,” Gossain said. “This is very complementary to our channel growth strategy as well as our direct sales strategy.”

Alation raised $110 million in a Series D round of funding in June that boosted the company’s pre-money valuation to $1.2 billion.