Alation Acquires Numbers Station to Enhance AI Agent Capabilities for Enterprise Data Workflows

Alation acquires Numbers Station to bolster its AI agent offerings | TechCrunch

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Numbers Station, which builds AI-native data applications, is a Series A-stage startup that's raised more than $17 million in venture capital from firms including Norwest Venture Partners, Madrona and Factory, among others. Alation plans to integrate Numbers Station's products into its own as soon as the end of this quarter, Alation co-founder and CEO Satyen Sangani told TechCrunch. "One of the things that gave us a lot of confidence is the [companies] are architected in such a fundamentally complementary way that we could get the integration done really fast," he said. Data and knowledge consumption is increasingly happening through large language models, Sangani said, but the fact that LLMs are prone to hallucinate means that enterprise haven't yet been able to meaningfully adopt AI data tools. Sangani said that his company's next stage of data management had to include a translation layer that sits between the LLMs and an enterprise's data. Numbers Station was a natural choice to provide that layer, Sangani said, because it already builds AI agents that work on structured data. The fact that Venky Ganti, a former co-founder at Alation, worked at Numbers Station for a handful of years didn't hurt, either. "[The] ability to basically make LLMs have the ability to talk to the core databases that fuel and run the enterprise, we think is basically the problem to solve to make LLMs scale inside of the enterprise," Sangani said. Alation started to build its own AI agents last year, Sangani said, including one for data quality and one for documentation that the company expects to release this quarter. But acquiring a company like Numbers Station allows Alation to offer workflow automations faster. "What we bring to bear is all of the metadata and all the context around the data and this massive, gnarly library of connectors and all of this enterprise knowledge," Sangani said. "And what they bring to bear is the ability to bring these LLMs, and take their cutting-edge technologies, and operate on that data." Alation was founded in 2012 and currently works with more than 600 enterprise customers including Nasdaq, Hertz, and Samsung, among others. The company has raised more than $300 million in venture funding from firms including General Catalyst, Andreessen Horowitz, and Sapphire Ventures. The company was last valued at $1.7 billion in 2022.

Alation acquires Numbers Station to expand AI agent capabilities for enterprise data workflows - SiliconANGLE

Alation acquires Numbers Station to expand AI agent capabilities for enterprise data workflows Data intelligence company Alation Inc. announced today it has acquired Numbers Station Inc., a startup that's building artificial intelligence agents for data workflows, for an undisclosed sum. Founded in 2021 when it was spun out of Stanford University's AI research labs, Numbers Station specializes in building AI agents that automate complex data workflows, targeting the needs of modern data teams within large enterprises. Numbers Station's platform leverages large language models to bring natural language understanding and reasoning to structured data tasks. In doing so, the platform allows users to interact with data using plain English, eliminating the need for SQL queries or custom scripts, which helps democratize data access across an organization. The company's platform uses a multi-agent architecture, where different AI agents are allocated tasks such as data cleaning, transformation, enrichment and analysis. The agents work together in orchestrated pipelines, enabling end-to-end data workflows that are claimed to be faster, more accurate and easier to build. Numbers Station's offering works with existing enterprise infrastructure, allowing organizations to deploy AI-native applications without having to overhaul their current systems. Post-acquisition, Numbers Station agents will be combined with Alation's rich metadata foundation to allow customers to build intelligent applications that reason over structured data, understand business context and automate real-time decision-making, all while also maintaining rigorous governance and compliance standards. According to Alation, the combination of the tech from both companies will unlock a new era of agentic workflows that can deliver tangible business outcomes at enterprise scale. "Numbers Station has proven the impact AI agents can have in the enterprise when companies are able to trust this new way of working and brings an exceptional team that shares our obsession with empowering data users," explains Alation co-founder and Chief Executive Satyen Sangani. "Together, we're laying the foundation for the next decade of enterprise data intelligence - one where humans and agents collaborate seamlessly to turn data into action." As part of the acquisition, the Numbers Station team (pictured) is joining Alation, which said all Numbers Station customers will be fully supported and benefit from expanded resources and a roadmap of continuity under Alation's platform. Coming into its acquisition, Numbers Station had raised $12.5 million over two rounds, according to Tracxn. Investors in the company included Madrona Venture Group, Norwest Venture Partners LP and Factory. Sangani spoke with theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's livestreaming studio, in September, when he discussed how the company's integration with Salesforce Data Cloud supports accuracy and compliance for AI models.

Alation Looks To Accelerate AI Agentic Workflow Development With Acquisition

Alation will add Numbers Station's technology to its data intelligence platform, providing organizations with the ability to build and deploy next-generation AI-native analytics applications fueled by agentic data workflows. Data intelligence platform provider Alation has acquired Numbers Station, a startup pioneer in building AI agents for managing data workflows. Alation said the combination of its platform with Numbers Station's technology will boost the ability of data and engineering teams to quickly build and deploy a new class of AI-native analytics applications featuring "agentic workflows that operate with enterprise-grade governance and context," according to the Alation announcement. With the wave of AI development that began with the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, developers have sought ways to apply AI to data problems while often struggling to provide AI systems with the data they need to operate effectively. [Related: Meeting The Data Needs Of The AI World: The 2025 CRN Big Data 100] Many businesses have sought to apply their structured corporate data, such as financial transactions and customer records, to AI. But AI agents, according to Alation, have difficulty understanding and acting on data due to incomplete semantics and data definitions, unclear data governance policies, missing context of data lineage and poor data quality. That often leads to AI agents producing inaccurate outputs and violating data privacy and compliance requirements, according to Alation. Alation's data intelligence platform provides a range of data search, data catalog, data lineage and data governance capabilities. The company, founded in 2012 and headquartered in Redwood City, Calif., has developed several of its own agents including Documentation Agent, Data Quality Agent and Data Products Builder Agent, according to its website. Numbers Station, founded in 2021, got its start at Stanford University's AI lab where co-founders CEO Chris Aberger, Chief Scientist Ines Chami and Chief Architect Sen Wu met under the mentorship of co-founder Chris Re and authored an academic paper about applying AI to data problems, according to the Numbers Station website. That led to the company's founding and development of its software that enables artificial intelligence data workflows. The technology uses a multi-agent architecture to automate end-to-end data workflows, enabling users to generate insights and act on data through specialized AI agents, according to a description of Numbers Stations' product on the Crunchbase website. By combining Numbers Station's agents with Alation's metadata foundation, customers can build intelligent applications that reason over structured data, understand business context, and automate real-time decision-making -- all while maintaining rigorous governance and compliance standards, according to the two companies. "Numbers Station has proven the impact AI agents can have in the enterprise when companies are able to trust this new way of working and brings an exceptional team that shares our obsession with empowering data users," said Alation co-founder and CEO Satyen Sangani, in a statement. "Together, we're laying the foundation for the next decade of enterprise data intelligence -- one where humans and agents collaborate seamlessly to turn data into action." "From the start, our vision has been to enable anyone to be a data app builder," Numbers Station CEO Aberger said in the statement. "By joining forces with Alation, we're pairing our AI-native foundation with the most trusted enterprise data intelligence platform. This unlocks a future where agents don't just find data -- they do more with it." Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Numbers Station had raised $17 million in a Series A funding round with investors Madrona, Factory and Norwest participating. The Numbers Station team will join Alation, the companies said. Numbers Station is based in Menlo Park, Calif. with some team members in Seattle and elsewhere around the world.