Alation

Alation was founded in Redwood City by four founders: Satyen Sangani, Venky Ganti, Feng Niu, and Aaron Kalb. The company’s origin centered on solving how to connect people with questions to the data that has answers.

Alation launched its first modern data catalog after emerging from stealth. The company describes this release as the first modern data catalog and a defining category milestone.

Alation introduced Allie AI, bringing generative curation into the catalog. The company says the feature was designed to draft documentation and curate metadata at scale.

Alation launched governance capabilities built for LLMs and RAG. The company framed this as extending its data-catalog foundation to AI-era governance needs.

Alation announced its agentic platform, describing it as a foundation for AI agents to act on governed data rather than interpret untrusted data themselves.

Alation acquired Numbers Station, the Stanford AI Lab team behind foundational work on enterprise data tasks using foundation models. Alation describes this as bringing the team into the company.

Alation introduced Chat with Your Data in plain language, allowing business users to query governed data directly without SQL. The company positions it as a natural-language access capability for trusted analytics.

Alation said Agent Studio shipped production agents. The company described it as a place to build, govern, and run purpose-built agents on top of the catalog.