Atolio Raises Series A to Bring Secure Enterprise Search to the World

We closed our Series A and have raised $24M in total funding to bring secure AI-powered enterprise search to the world’s largest companies and organizations.  

Deploying AI in the enterprise while keeping control of all data

Employees expect consumer-grade AI experiences at work to search and discover the institutional knowledge they need to get their jobs done, boards and CEOs need ways to leverage AI to compete in a world where every business is continually becoming more efficient, and CIOs and CTOs are in the middle, trying to find ways to deliver measurable outcomes while mitigating the risk of losing control of their enterprise data.

There are three primary concerns regarding data privacy and the security perimeter around enterprise knowledge – the data can be stolen, corporate IP can leak and inadvertently be used to train public language models like OpenAI, and with data sovereignty concerns, the data needs to reside in a designated country, region, or even specific datacenter as required by law, regulation, or geopolitical views.

Any solution for enterprises in the realm of enterprise search and knowledge discovery needs to put the enterprise in full control of their own data.  A system that aggregates data across platforms, many of which are running on private clouds or physical hardware, must also be deployed on a private cloud or in a datacenter, where control of the crown jewels remains with the organization and no data ever goes to any public cloud.

Learning by Listening

The advice we got from Alex Rosemblat (CMO at Datadog for many years) in the incorporation days was to live in chapter three of Steve Blank’s Four Steps to the Epiphany until we understood what our potential clients wanted us to build in the short term and where they wanted us to go in the coming years.

Accordingly, before we launched the first version of our product, we talked with senior executives at 762 large enterprises (a story of its own) to understand the problem of information discovery in the enterprise as well as we possibly could.  Not the basics of whether it was now possible to build, and if so, what has changed, but at a much deeper level, what does it mean to each company to make knowledge discoverable and accessible for the first time?

The common thread we heard from hundreds of CIOs and CTOs around the world and across industries is that any solution to this problem in the enterprise (the “real world”) absolutely has to be deployed in a way where the enterprise controls their data, the Atolio deployment, and the use of the models end-to-end, and no data ever goes out to the public cloud.  The deployment can be on any major private cloud, in an air-gapped environment, or on physical hardware – but regardless, it needs to align to this fundamental principle that any system that aggregates all corporate knowledge must always remain under the control of the client.

Going past what to build and how to build it, the crux of what we were after with all these conversations was understanding “My problem is…”: 

“My problem is, I’m a CIO in manufacturing, and 80% of our orders are custom, and we have six systems that sit in front of SAP – our sales reps are sitting in the parking lot and they have no way to go tell a client the status of an order, because it could be sitting in any one of those six systems.”

“My problem is, we are a Fortune 100 company where 78% of our accounts transition every year – we need a way to help our reps surface information from across all these systems in one place so they can come up to speed a lot faster.”

“My problem is, we’re a <redacted US government agency>, we need to tell what content is accessible to non-US citizens across all of our systems.”

Other key insights from those product discovery conversations that shaped our product up to this point are that answering “who knows about topic X” is as important as “where is the information,” and that the system that needs to exist gives users a way to iterate and dive deeper into topics without having to know upfront what questions they want to ask, what information exists, or what to search for.  In other words, the solution is an engine for discovery, a unified conversational interface over the specific set of knowledge you have access to at the moment you query.  An interface that weaves together question answering, expertise, and search in one place.

Cengage is an edtech firm and an early Atolio client, and as CEO Michael Hansen said on their recent earnings call:

“We are investing in automation to drive internal efficiencies like an AI-powered search with products such as Atolio to improve the availability of product and customer information to Sales and Marketing teams and reduce the effort required to find answers to day-to-day problems. We believe these tools will significantly increase productivity of our go-to-market teams.”

Why raise

We have closed multiple seven-figure contracts in the last three quarters, and we’re ready to scale our company to share the work our team has done with the world.

We’ve raised our capital with four objectives in mind: to build out our platform, to create the next 100 fully-permission-aware connectors, to scale our world-class engineering and GTM teams, and to share with the world that the fully-private enterprise search product they’re looking for does exist.

As we like to say, “help plus advice is a lot better than just advice,” and as the focus of this round is help us scale global distribution, we’re extremely excited to add Translink (many large conglomerates are LPs), IBM (greatest sales channel in the world), Acorn Pacific Ventures (opportunity to grow globally via cross-border partnerships), and others to our cap table, joining our prior lead Bloomberg Beta and ten legendary unicorn founders among many others.

Translink found us after being asked by a major financial institution to find a secure enterprise search product, and we are respectfully in awe of the opportunity we have before us – to be the team who can serve large enterprises globally, in a product domain where over the next 15 years, almost all companies will make an investment in a product in our space.

Looking Forward

From our time at Splunk, Gareth and David often make the analogy that Atolio is Splunk for unstructured data.  What we mean by that is that under the hood, there are primitives like graphs, permissions, and the index, and the opportunity is to build agents and applications on top that find novel ways to combine these.  Like how Splunk started as a log management system and evolved into a security platform, our current interface is really an application built on top of the platform, one application of many that will come.  

In order to solve unique and differentiated problems with agents, you’ll want to combine these primitives across systems in ways that MCP is fundamentally unable to, and solving these problems depends on getting access to sensitive data and systems, which in turn depends on building the platform correctly and securely in the first place so companies own and control the entire thing.

This problem is in many ways at the intersection of what we’ve learned building scalable enterprise search software on infrastructure you don’t control at Splunk, and the lessons on reliability we learned while at PagerDuty, which supports many of the world’s largest internet services. 

Just like we saw at Splunk, much of the future, the agents and components that will be built on our platform, will not be built by us, but by our partners and clients.  We are accordingly working on distribution systems, informed by the lessons Gareth learned in building Splunkbase, Splunk’s app store.  More to come on that in the near future.

Thank You

We’d like to close with a sincere “thank you” to our current and future team, our clients, CIO & CTOs who have been and will be Atolio Conversations guests, and our investors.  We are delighted to grow our company with your support, and we’ll be at KubeCon in Atlanta and NVIDIA GTC in DC coming up – if you’re around, we’d love to say hello.  

LFG!

Mark, Gareth, David, and the Atolio team

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