Big Data Platform Developer AtScale Secures $50 Million In Funding

AtScale, which aims to remake the data warehouse industry with its data warehouse virtualization platform, has raised $50 million in Series D financing, the company said Wednesday.

AtScale plans to use the new financing to more rapidly expand its sales and marketing efforts, both in North America and internationally – including ramping up its channel efforts, CEO and executive chairman Chris Lynch said in an interview with CRN.

"We plan to use the additional funding for brand and revenue expansion," Lynch said.

Morgan Stanley led the latest funding round, joined by new investors and previous investors, the latter including Storm Ventures, Wells Fargo and Atlantic Bridge.

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AtScale, founded in 2013 and based in San Mateo, Calif., develops its Universal Semantic Layer technology that creates a virtualization layer for online analytical processing (OLAP) tasks, allowing organizations to integrate multiple on-premise and cloud data sources into a single virtual data warehouse. The company offers its technology as an alternative to traditional centralized, on-premise data warehouses that are loaded with data moved from other sources.

Lynch, previously CEO at Vertica Systems, took over the CEO post in June from co-founder Dave Mariani, who is now the company's CTO. Lynch said he was hired to scale up the company's operations as it grows beyond its early development stages.

AtScale has doubled its sales in 2018, Lynch said, and it brought in 50 new customers this year. Customers include TD Bank, Allstate, Kraft-Heinz and JPMorgan Chase.

The company has been staffing up and in the last year hired former DataStax executive Ayal Steinberg as vice president of worldwide sales and former DataRobot executive Scott Howser as chief product officer. It has also opened an office in Boston, which will have a particular focus on developing machine learning technology, and a development center in Sofia, Bulgaria.

AtScale works closely with global and regional systems integrators, especially those with big data and business analytics practices, Lynch said. "A lot of our leads come from our partner ecosystem," he said.

The company is in the process of hiring a channels director, who will join the company in early 2019 and oversee the development of a complete channel program, according to the CEO. And the broader sales and marketing expansion plans include additional channel enablement and support for partners.

The company also plans to accelerate its partner recruiting efforts. Lynch said AtScale's technology offers opportunities for systems integrators and solution providers to bundle AtScale with other big data technologies and services.

AtScale is particularly targeting solution providers that worked with Netezza data warehouse appliances with the goal of converting Netezza owners to AtScale's products. (IBM acquired Netezza in 2010 and is ending support for some Netezza models in 2019.)

"It's a great opportunity for partners that have been working in this space," Lynch said. "We want to take these partners and their customers to the cloud, non-disruptively."

While AtScale's technology is well-along in its development, the company will use some of the new funding to continue expanding the Universal Semantic Layer's capabilities and developing links to business analytics tools from other vendors.

AtScale has raised a little more than $100 million in total funding. Lynch said this funding round could be enough to see the company through to an initial public offering, or an acquisition by a bigger company. But he would not rule out another funding round in the future.