This is part of a series of interviews with the winners of The Economic Times Startup Awards 2025.
As companies rush to adopt artificial intelligence (AI), data collaboration startup Atlan is positioning its platform as a bridge that helps enterprises take AI from pilot projects to full-scale deployment.
The opportunity is big, noted Atlan cofounder Prukalpa Sankar, winner of the ET Startup Awards 2025 Woman Ahead category, citing a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) report that found 95% of generative AI projects fail at the pilot stage and never reach production .
“The challenge lies in what we call the AI context gap,” she said.
Atlan’s platform stitches together a company’s scattered data and AI use cases into what it calls a context layer, creating a single version of truth.
The company launched Atlan AI in 2023, embedding intelligence across its product suite.
“There’s no great AI without great data,” said Sankar, speaking from San Diego. “But beyond data, there’s the meaning problem, large language models understand language, not the meaning of your business. And then there’s governance. These three together create what we call the AI context gap, and it’s what prevents AI from going into production. That’s the problem we solve.”
The context gap refers to the disconnect between what AI systems understand and what a business actually means. Even with the right data, AI tools often fail to interpret internal definitions and workflows.
Atlan’s growth is being driven by this need for AI readiness, said Sankar, an engineer from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. “We operate in a category where the problem only gets bigger in the AI era,” she said.
Sankar, who grew up in Hyderabad and Baroda, noted that India underinvested in AI research and infrastructure while the US and China took the lead.
“We’re still in the very early stages of the AI supercycle,” she said, noting that leading Indian venture funds continue to back US-based AI startups.
“In the first wave, the advantage went to researchers, and both China and the US made much larger, long-term investments in AI research and infrastructure. India has historically underinvested there, so we’re seeing the effects of that now,” Sankar said.
However, the country has the potential to emerge a leader in applied AI, which she called the third wave of AI.
“We’ve always been strong at building solutions and applying technology. As a country, we’ve focused more on the application layer than the research layer,” Sankar said. “So, I think the coming years could see India play a meaningful role in applied AI. I’m curious and optimistic to see how that plays out.”
Atlan’s growth
A turning point for Sankar came in 2018, when the sudden exit of an analyst from her data-focused consulting startup SocialCops exposed the fragility of knowledge management, inspiring the first version of Atlan, launched in 2020.
Atlan, cofounded with Varun Banka – who also cofounded SocialCops with Sankar – raised $206 million between 2021 and 2024 from the likes of Insight Partners, Peak XV Partners ( formerly Sequoia India), Salesforce Ventures, and Singapore’s GIC, among others, valuing it at $750 million. The company’s revenue has grown 120% year-on-year, aided by rising demand for data readiness and governance tools in enterprise AI.
Sankar and Banka had earlier won the ET Startup Award in 2019 in the social enterprise category for SocialCops.
This year, Sankar stood out as one of the few female founders building in deep tech.
She acknowledges the crowded market that includes Alation, Collibra, and enterprise giants such as Microsoft (Purview), Informatica, and IBM. Other big names in the space include Databricks (Unity Catalog) and Snowflake (Horizon), which compete in data governance, metadata management, and AI readiness for enterprises.
“There’s all this excitement and money flowing into AI, but when you talk to data and AI leaders, they often don’t know where to start,” Sankar said. “One chief data officer told me he had a thousand AI use cases on his roadmap but didn’t even know what data he had in the first place.”
Sankar is based in San Francisco. About 70% of Atlan’s business is concentrated in the US. The company’s employees are spread globally, and Sankar said the team has been largely “sheltered from US policy shifts because we don’t have strong geographical concentrations.”
As companies rush to adopt artificial intelligence (AI), data collaboration startup Atlan is positioning its platform as a bridge that helps enterprises take AI from pilot projects to full-scale deployment.
The opportunity is big, noted Atlan cofounder Prukalpa Sankar, winner of the ET Startup Awards 2025 Woman Ahead category, citing a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) report that found 95% of generative AI projects fail at the pilot stage and never reach production .
“The challenge lies in what we call the AI context gap,” she said.
Atlan’s platform stitches together a company’s scattered data and AI use cases into what it calls a context layer, creating a single version of truth.
The company launched Atlan AI in 2023, embedding intelligence across its product suite.
“There’s no great AI without great data,” said Sankar, speaking from San Diego. “But beyond data, there’s the meaning problem, large language models understand language, not the meaning of your business. And then there’s governance. These three together create what we call the AI context gap, and it’s what prevents AI from going into production. That’s the problem we solve.”
The context gap refers to the disconnect between what AI systems understand and what a business actually means. Even with the right data, AI tools often fail to interpret internal definitions and workflows.
Atlan’s growth is being driven by this need for AI readiness, said Sankar, an engineer from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. “We operate in a category where the problem only gets bigger in the AI era,” she said.
Sankar, who grew up in Hyderabad and Baroda, noted that India underinvested in AI research and infrastructure while the US and China took the lead.
“We’re still in the very early stages of the AI supercycle,” she said, noting that leading Indian venture funds continue to back US-based AI startups.
“In the first wave, the advantage went to researchers, and both China and the US made much larger, long-term investments in AI research and infrastructure. India has historically underinvested there, so we’re seeing the effects of that now,” Sankar said.
However, the country has the potential to emerge a leader in applied AI, which she called the third wave of AI.
“We’ve always been strong at building solutions and applying technology. As a country, we’ve focused more on the application layer than the research layer,” Sankar said. “So, I think the coming years could see India play a meaningful role in applied AI. I’m curious and optimistic to see how that plays out.”
Atlan’s growth
A turning point for Sankar came in 2018, when the sudden exit of an analyst from her data-focused consulting startup SocialCops exposed the fragility of knowledge management, inspiring the first version of Atlan, launched in 2020.
Atlan, cofounded with Varun Banka – who also cofounded SocialCops with Sankar – raised $206 million between 2021 and 2024 from the likes of Insight Partners, Peak XV Partners ( formerly Sequoia India), Salesforce Ventures, and Singapore’s GIC, among others, valuing it at $750 million. The company’s revenue has grown 120% year-on-year, aided by rising demand for data readiness and governance tools in enterprise AI.
Sankar and Banka had earlier won the ET Startup Award in 2019 in the social enterprise category for SocialCops.
This year, Sankar stood out as one of the few female founders building in deep tech.
She acknowledges the crowded market that includes Alation, Collibra, and enterprise giants such as Microsoft (Purview), Informatica, and IBM. Other big names in the space include Databricks (Unity Catalog) and Snowflake (Horizon), which compete in data governance, metadata management, and AI readiness for enterprises.
“There’s all this excitement and money flowing into AI, but when you talk to data and AI leaders, they often don’t know where to start,” Sankar said. “One chief data officer told me he had a thousand AI use cases on his roadmap but didn’t even know what data he had in the first place.”
Sankar is based in San Francisco. About 70% of Atlan’s business is concentrated in the US. The company’s employees are spread globally, and Sankar said the team has been largely “sheltered from US policy shifts because we don’t have strong geographical concentrations.”
