Cross-posted from IBM's announcement
At IBM Ventures, we believe the future of enterprise productivity lies in intelligent, secure and flexible search experiences that respect data sovereignty, integrate seamlessly across platforms and are powered by the latest advancements in AI. That’s why we’re excited to announce our investment in Atolio, the only fully self-hosted, AI-powered enterprise search platform designed for security-conscious organizations.
The enterprise search problem: Fragmentation meets risk
Enterprise data is scattered across countless tools, and traditional search solutions struggle to unify this information, especially in industries where data privacy, compliance, and control are non-negotiable. In fact, 38% of IT leaders cite security and governance concerns as key barriers to scaling AI, according to a Forrester Consulting study commissioned by Tines.
Atolio solves this problem head-on with a platform that enables organizations to deploy AI-powered search entirely within their own infrastructure, either on-premises or in their virtual private cloud (VPC), ensuring complete control over sensitive data. With permission-aware indexing, native connectors, and support for both open-source and proprietary LLMs, Atolio delivers a secure, unified search experience that’s tailored to each user’s access rights.
A strategic fit for IBM’s hybrid cloud and AI vision
Atolio’s architecture aligns directly with IBM’s hybrid cloud and AI strategy. Just as Red Hat OpenShift enables consistent deployment across environments, Atolio empowers enterprises to bring AI to their data wherever it lives. Their model-agnostic approach supports integration with watsonx, Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini and open-source models like Meta’s Llama, giving customers the flexibility to choose the right model for their needs.
A team built for enterprise scale
Atolio’s founding team brings deep experience in enterprise software and AI infrastructure. CEO David Lanstein and CRO Mark Matta helped scale PagerDuty from USD 1M to over USD 100M in ARR. CTO Gareth Watts was instrumental in building Splunk’s early cloud products and secure ingestion layers.
Together, they’ve assembled a team that understands the technical and go-to-market challenges of serving large, regulated enterprises. Their early traction speaks volumes: customers like Cengage, Cribl and the U.S. Air Force are already seeing measurable productivity gains (up to 62% in some teams) by using Atolio to unify and secure their enterprise knowledge.
Building the infrastructure for the next era of enterprise technology
At IBM Ventures, we invest in companies that are building the infrastructure for the next era of enterprise technology. Atolio is doing just that: redefining how organizations access and interact with their knowledge, securely and intelligently.
We’re proud to support Atolio as they scale their go-to-market efforts and continue to innovate in AI-powered enterprise search. We believe their platform will become foundational to how enterprises harness the power of AI securely, flexibly and at scale.
