Harvesting Numbers

Prukalpa Sankar has a knack for starting up businesses in unexplored territories. While doing her undergrad from Nanyang Technical University, Singapore, Sankar along with her batchmate Varun Banka, launched data intelligence firm SocialCops in 2013. They collected data from government bodies, volunteers, onfield workers and went on to build Disha, Indias national data platform, which has data from the countrys 42 government schemes. During their work, they realised the big chaos that data management was, which led to the birth of Atlan.

Almost 200 data projects for SocialCops such as India's National Data Platform, global SDG monitoring portal, and gas subsidy programme Ujjwala were built on data management platform Atlan. After two years of incubating it in-house, in 2019, the co-founders launched it as another venture to help out analysts and engineers across organisations with data projects. Atlan integrates with customer's cloud data storage layers such as Amazon Web Services and Azure data lakes & warehouses.

"Like Github brought efficiency and agility in code management for engineering teams, with Atlan, we want to bring those principles in data operations," says Sankar. "The idea is to make data teams agile so businesses can get faster return on investment (ROI) out of their data projects." The Singapore-based firm has Fortune 500 companies such as Unilever and SoftBank-backed startup Funding Societies on its client list. For the next six-eight months, the focus will be on product development, says Sankar.