ServiceNow Acquires Data.World to Enhance AI-Ready Data Infrastructure

ServiceNow acquires Data.World months after snatching up Moveworks | TechCrunch

Enterprise workflow management platform ServiceNow on Wednesday announced its second AI-related acquisition this year. ServiceNow said that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Data.World, a cloud-native data catalog and data governance platform. Austin, Texas-based Data.World, now called Declan, was founded in 2015, and previously raised more than $130 million in venture financing from firms including Alumni Ventures, Prologis Ventures, and Shasta Ventures, according to Crunchbase. The terms of the deal weren't disclosed. Declan was most recently valued at $350 million in the company's 2022 $50 million Series C round, per PitchBook. Gaurav Rewari, an SVP and GM of data analytics at ServiceNow, told TechCrunch that ServiceNow was looking for companies they could partner with that would help customers deploy AI at scale. Specifically, ServiceNow was looking to give businesses better resources to make their data "AI-ready." "As I like to say, this path to agentic 'AI heaven' goes through some form of data hell, and that's the grim reality," Rewari said. He added that Declan was the right choice to help ServiceNow customers with this problem because Declan helps enterprises organize and easily search through their data. The addition of Declan's data governance tools will help customers get the most out of their AI agents and other forms of AI automation, Rewari said. "We looked at a bunch of companies and came away so impressed with what they had built," he added. "We felt that the whole journey that they were on, with respect to metadata management [and] knowledge-based infrastructure, to provide cataloging of data across the vast enterprise and the governance of that data itself -- that could be an extremely important addition to our product portfolio." Rewari said that once the deal closes, Declan will begin integrating into ServiceNow, with Declan's platform being offered as a product to ServiceNow customers in the near future. It's ServiceNow's second acquisition in recent months. ServiceNow announced in March that it agreed to acquire Moveworks, which develops enterprise-focused automation and AI tools, for $2.85 billion. These acquisitions all fit nicely into ServiceNow's plan to embrace agentic AI and the tools required to build it. In March 2024, ServiceNow SVP of corporate business development, Philip Kirk, told TechCrunch that ServiceNow was going to approach the transition to agentic AI through a mix of building and buying capabilities. "It is kind of three-dimensional chess right now to figure out whether to build, buy, or partner," Kirk said at the time. "I think the biggest thing that we try to prioritize is how we can make decisions that are in the long-term best interest of our customers, and that differentiate us from what we know we're world-class at, which is enterprise automation in our platform."

ServiceNow To Acquire data.world For AI-driven Catalog, Governance Tech

Data.world's catalog and governance technologies are expected to help strengthen the ServiceNow AI Platform and expand the capabilities of Workflow Data Fabric. AI-focused digital transformation technology developer ServiceNow Wednesday said it plans to acquire data.world as a way to improve its ability to deliver data catalog and governance solutions to help companies build AI-enabled infrastructures. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company also unveiled new capabilities around its Workflow Data Fabric aimed at building a data ecosystem to power AI agents and workflows while providing them real-time intelligence. ServiceNow unveiled the acquisition and new Workflow Data Fabric capabilities during its ServiceNow Knowledge 2025 conference held this week in Las Vegas. [Related: ServiceNow CEO: 'The Destruction Of Time Is Like The Ultimate Enemy Of Humanity'] ServiceNow did not disclose the terms of the acquisition. ServiceNow executives were not available to provide additional details by publication time. Austin, Texas-based data.world is a leading enterprise data catalog and governance platform powering the strategic data initiatives for some of the world's most recognizable brands. Customers include Siemens, Associated Press, Norwegian Cruise Lines, and Penguin Random House. The company is also unusual in that it is a certified B Corp., which means it meets high standards of verified social and environmental performance, public transparency, and legal accountability to balance profit and purpose. data.world also claims to be home to the world's largest collaborative open data community. ServiceNow plans to use data.world to help strengthen the ServiceNow AI Platform and expand the capabilities of Workflow Data Fabric. The ServiceNow AI Platform is a cloud-based foundation that includes a wide array of AI-powered enterprise business apps for workflow automation, as well as a database and low/no code development tools for extensibility, to help digitize workflows across functions and critical business systems by connecting them on a single platform. The ServiceNow Workflow Data Fabricis an enhanced integrated data layer that unifies business and technology data across the enterprise, powering all workflows and AI agents with real-time, secure access to data from any source. According to ServiceNow, data.world will make it easier for ServiceNow to manage enterprise data assets as agentic AI becomes more common. The data.world technology also breaks data down into strategic and more manageable components. ServiceNow also introduced on Wednesday new capabilities for its Workflow Data Fabric technology. These include a data ecosystem to power AI agents and workflows with real-time intelligence. It also includes the company's new Workflow Data Network, which is a broad ecosystem of data platforms, applications, and enterprise tools to enhance Workflow Data Fabric to better connect, understand, and take action from any data source via the ServiceNow AI Platform. Workflow Data Network connects an ecosystem of trusted data partnerships to help enable secure and compliant activation of data across environments, including external data, to better empower AI agents with full context and help ensure more informed decisions, faster actions, and greater accuracy, ServiceNow said.

A New Layer To ServiceNow Agentic AI: Exec Gaurav Rewari On The Data.world Acquisition

There's a lot going on at ServiceNow and its push towards workflow automation. For more, read the entire conversation with Rewari, which has been lightly edited for clarity. Maybe I can sort of paint a bigger picture about how we're thinking about data and analytics in general, and from there progress to the rationale behind the acquisition. As we thought about what we're doing with agentic AI, Bill [McDermott, ServiceNow CEO] has been talking about how the other disruptions that we've seen with mobile and cloud almost pale in comparison to what we're seeing now, not just in terms of the scale, but also in terms of the velocity at which companies are moving. And so we thought about it. There's a line I used in my keynote about, the road to agentic AI heaven often goes through a data hell, and it's borne out by statistics from Gartner. There's a focus group that Gartner ran not too long ago that said 4 percent, only 4 percent, of technology leaders felt their data was AI-ready, and that 60 percent of AI projects will fail by 2026 because the data is not AI-ready. We said, 'OK, what can we do to help our customers and partner with them on their journey to getting their data estate AI-ready?' What did you find? We identified three things. The first is the number of complex transactions and workflows that will have to be processed because now there's machines also doing workflows, not just humans, is going to increase by one or two orders. And these are thinking machines, so we need to be able to support analytical processing in addition to operational processing. We were very early in AI. We were exposed to what that future world might look like much earlier than many other companies. So we invested in our next-generation AI-ready database called RaptorDB. It's been available for about three quarters, and we're continuing to invest in it, grow it. Number two is, you know your AI agents are only going to be as smart as the data you expose them to. And if it's just ServiceNow data, then we're missing a trick. Customers are not going to get signals from the other data sitting enterprise-wide. And that's why we built Workflow Data Fabric. With Workflow Data Fabric, we gave them access not just to the data in ServiceNow, but also to external data sources, enterprise-wide data, data that's still inside the enterprise. And this could be data that you bring in and put in RaptorDB, or you can let it stay in place. So we want to throw open the surface area beyond just the data that's in ServiceNow. And we can either move that external data sources into RaptorDB, or we can let it stay in place in a database, in Snowflake, in Google BigQuery, in Amazon Redshift, and the technology that makes that possible is zero copy connectors. Wednesday, we really expanded the frontier of integration in all flavors, either the connectors to where the data comes across or where they stay in place. We are calling that the Workflow Data Network. And it's like the arms and legs of the Workflow Data Fabric. It fans out and allows you to tap into data sources across the enterprise. Why? Because you need to have your AI agents learn what they need to learn so they can do what you want them to do. And the third? Number three is, it's not just about the quantity of data that you allow AI agents to access. It's also about data quality. It's about data trust. Can you trust that data? Do you understand its lineage? Has it been properly governed? Do you understand the relationships between those data feeds? And that third piece of the puzzle, this whole notion of data governance and catalog, that's the piece we didn't have. And that's where data.world comes in, because it's a knowledge graph-powered data catalog and data governance solution. They have a large number of very sizable customers, so they go after large enterprises as well. And so we decided they would be a perfect fit, because they give us data cataloging and data governance capabilities so you can trust the quality of the data. It's architecturally built on a knowledge graph, which is a core architectural principle of ServiceNow pretty much from day one. That's why we made the move. With these three things, we make the data estate AI-ready, so you know your path to AI agentic heaven goes through not a full-blown data hell, but is less painful.