2024 at Atlan: A Love Letter to the Humans of Data 💌 – Atlan

This Valentine’s Season, we’re reflecting on all our dreams that came to life in 2024 and want to take a moment to celebrate the people who make those dreams real—the humans of data. 💙

At the heart of Atlan’s story is a wall—our dream wall. Since our earliest days, it’s been a tradition where our team comes together each year to write down our boldest ambitions. These dreams are not just about the milestones we hope to reach—they are guiding lights for how we help data teams do their lives’ best work.

Putting up our first dream wall in 2019

Our Dreams on the Wall: A Vision for Data Teams Everywhere

From becoming “the icon on the desktop for data teams everywhere” to “helping the teams solving the world’s biggest problems, like curing cancer,” these dreams have shaped our journey. 2024 marked another extraordinary chapter in this journey—a year where many more of these dreams took flight. Together with our customers, partners, and the Atlan team, we’ve seen the power of these dreams transform into something real and meaningful.

Re:Govern 2024: Creating the Future of AI Governance with the Humans of Data

Building on the success of our inaugural customer event, Re:Govern 2024 became the industry’s first of its kind virtual conference dedicated to the new era of data & AI governance. With visionary keynotes from Zhamak Dehghani on distributed data architectures and Eric Falthzik on scaling enterprise AI, Re:Govern emerged as a cornerstone for shaping the future of governance.

Moreover, data leaders from Patagonia, Dropbox, and General Motors joined us in sharing their transformative journeys, demonstrating how they’re reimagining governance in the AI era. The conference also marked the launch of Active Governance—our groundbreaking approach that transforms governance into a collaborative ecosystem, built to adapt to today’s rapidly changing and diverse data landscape.

Customer Journeys Shaping 2024

The year brought unforgettable moments at global events. At Databricks Data+AI Summit keynote, Brian Ames shared how Atlan transformed governance within General Motors as they pursue goals like zero emissions. We couldn’t help but think of the dream on our wall—the one about Atlan powering teams working on climate change.

At Snowflake Summit, we launched our new vision for governance alongside leaders from HubSpot and Grainger, bringing another dream to life: “To build the future of data governance.”

We also created an experience to remember with our Atlan-branded plane soaring over 15,000 attendees, an NBA-style locker room experience, and an innovative AI readiness mini-golf course. 

Throughout the year, data leaders shared their transformative journeys:

• At the Gartner Data & Analytics Summit, Martina Ivaničová from Kiwi.com demonstrated how they’re democratizing data for 100 million travel searches daily with Atlan.
• At dbt Coalesce, Cortney Worthy from Dropbox showcased how Atlan helped them scale to govern data from 700M users and 550B pieces of content.

Through each data team’s transformative journey, we showed the data community that Atlan isn’t just building the future of data and AI governance—we’re creating it together with the humans of data.

Innovation Built with Empathy

We dreamed of tackling the biggest challenges in data and AI – with empathy at the core. This vision drove our product innovation throughout 2024. We built Policy Manager and Transparency Center, which transformed policies from static documentation to rules that live within the tools the humans of data use every day. Data Products became a universal translator, bridging the language gap between engineers, analysts, and stewards. And with Data Contracts, we embedded governance directly into the daily workflows, helping data teams shift governance to the left.

Our commitment to understanding users’ needs took us across Europe with Data in Transit, visiting seven cities. By sitting down with data leaders, we gathered their honest insights, refining our vision to continue building tools that truly support their evolving needs. 

For detailed insights from each city, check out our Data in Transit series:  Hamburg | Geneva | Lausanne | Brno | Berlin | Paris 

Recognition That Celebrates our Community

We dreamed of achieving “the highest customer rating of any DataOps tool,” and in 2024, this dream came true in remarkable ways. Atlan was named a Visionary in the inaugural Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Data and Analytics Governance Platforms and earned top ratings in Gartner Peer Insights. To celebrate this milestone, we created a special music video honoring the visionary data leaders shaping the future.

Atlan was also named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Data Catalogs for Q3 2024, receiving the highest scores across all vendors in both “Current Offering” and “Strategy” categories. Forrester described Atlan as “an unparalleled partner” for organizations pursuing data democratization.

With 79 badges earned on G2 throughout the year, these milestones weren’t just recognition—they were proof of a dream coming true.

Building the Future of Enterprise Data

When we secured our $105 million Series C funding round, led by GIC and Meritech Capital, alongside commitments from Salesforce Ventures and PeakXV Partners, we had iconic investors join us in the mission of helping the humans of data and AI do more, together. Check out A New Era (Atlan’s Version)—our first ever music video celebrating this milestone.

We’re now seeing those early dreams materialize across industries through our growing customer base—from GM revolutionizing automotive data practices, to Fox reimagining media analytics, Autodesk innovating in technology, and Nasdaq shaping the future of financial data.

Looking Forward to 2025: More Dreams, More Love

To our customers who trust us, the partners who innovate with us, and the Atlanians who build with so much care – you made 2024 extraordinary. As we look ahead to 2025, we’re excited to push boundaries, solve challenges, and dream even bigger together.

We can’t wait to see what new dreams we’ll write together, and bring to life next.

With love and gratitude,

Team Atlan 💙