Alation acquires Numbers Station to bolster its AI agent offerings

Enterprise data intelligence platform Alation acquired Numbers Station to help give its customers access to AI agents that run on top of their structured data.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Numbers Station, which builds AI-native data applications, is a Series A-stage startup that’s raised more than $17 million in venture capital from firms including Norwest Venture Partners, Madrona, and Factory, among others.

Alation plans to integrate Numbers Station’s products into its own as soon as the end of this quarter, Alation co-founder and CEO Satyen Sangani told TechCrunch.

“One of the things that gave us a lot of confidence is the [companies] are architected in such a fundamentally complementary way that we could get the integration done really fast,” he said.

Data and knowledge consumption is increasingly happening through large language models, Sangani said, but the fact that LLMs are prone to hallucinate means that enterprises haven’t yet been able to meaningfully adopt AI data tools. Sangani said that his company’s next stage of data management had to include a translation layer that sits between the LLMs and an enterprise’s data.

Numbers Station was a natural choice to provide that layer, Sangani said, because it already builds AI agents that work on structured data. The fact that Venky Ganti, a former co-founder at Alation, worked at Numbers Station for a handful of years didn’t hurt, either.

“[The] ability to basically make LLMs have the ability to talk to the core databases that fuel and run the enterprise, we think is basically the problem to solve to make LLMs scale inside of the enterprise,” Sangani said.

Alation started to build its own AI agents last year, Sangani said, including one for data quality and one for documentation that the company expects to release this quarter. But acquiring a company like Numbers Station allows Alation to offer workflow automations faster.

“What we bring to bear is all of the metadata and all the context around the data and this massive, gnarly library of connectors and all of this enterprise knowledge,” Sangani said. “And what they bring to bear is the ability to bring these LLMs, and take their cutting-edge technologies, and operate on that data.”

Alation was founded in 2012 and currently works with more than 600 enterprise customers, including Nasdaq, Hertz, and Samsung, among others. The company has raised more than $300 million in venture funding from firms including General Catalyst, Andreessen Horowitz, and Sapphire Ventures. The company was last valued at $1.7 billion in 2022.