Acryl Data Secures $21Million Series A to Accelerate the Future of Data Management, Adding Data Observability and an Open Control Plane for Data

Acryl Data the company driving the DataHub Project, the most widely-used open source data catalog – announced that it has secured $21M in Series A funding led by Bhaskar Ghosh, Partner at 8VC, with participation from Ram Shriram, Founder, Sherpalo Ventures and Guillermo Rauch, Founder and CEO of Vercel. 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.

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“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”

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, Riskified, and MYOB 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.

Introducing Acryl Observe

Acryl today also announced Acryl Observe – a new fully-integrated observability module designed to increase trust in an organization’s most important data assets and enhance data quality management. Acryl Observe gives users a single platform for data observability, governance, and discovery, bringing data producer and consumer teams closer together. Driven by a central metadata control plane, Acryl Observe continuously monitors and detects data quality incidents in real-time, automates anomaly detection to prevent breakages, and drives faster resolution when they do occur. Acryl Observe is currently in private beta and the company is actively working with design partners to prepare for its generally available launch later in 2023.

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.

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“The explosion of data over the past decade has driven both opportunities and challenges for businesses,” said 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.”

The Control Plane for Data

Acryl has recognized the need for a powerful control plane that can bring order to this chaos – a single, declarative interface for defining and managing how data is used across a decentralized stack coupled with an observability layer that provides unprecedented visibility and auditability. The company is already building this control plane by harnessing the open-source DataHub project and its robust capabilities. This approach empowers organizations to enforce policies and workflow rules around data and offers a practical approach to implementing trends like data contracts and data mesh architectures.

Future versions of the platform, with development enabled by these funds, will thoughtfully incorporate generative AI capabilities. These capabilities will not only bring intuitive discovery experiences based on natural language capabilities but also further reduce the manual labor involved in data curation. Acryl will soon be able to suggest relevant datasets, intelligently curate metadata, and generate insights without requiring extensive manual effort.

With an open control plane that supports a suite of integrated capabilities such as a modern data catalog, an automation-driven governance console, and an observability engine that combines reactive and proactive approaches, Acryl is committed to building a magical experience for its customers and community.

“I would like to thank our team, our customers and the DataHub community, all of whom have been critical in the evolution of Acryl Data,” said CEO Swaroop Jagadish. “I am very excited about the innovations we have brought to market so far and enthusiastic about the road that lies ahead for Acryl as we work to deliver modern data management to the enterprise.”

Investors Express Enthusiasm about Acryl

“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 Ghosh. “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 Shriram. “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.”

“There is a compelling wave of data innovations on the horizon, from data contracts and distributed data mesh architectures to the broad changes that machine learning and AI promise to deliver,” said Rauch. “The question for many organizations is how to wade into these ventures safely, and I believe Acryl can be the control plane to bring these revolutions into reality.

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