ServiceNow acquires Data.World months after snatching up Moveworks

Enterprise workflow management platform ServiceNow on Wednesday announced its second AI-related acquisition this year.

ServiceNow said that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Data.World, a cloud-native data catalog and data governance platform. Austin, Texas-based Data.World was founded in 2015, and previously raised more than $130 million in venture financing from firms such as Alumni Ventures, Prologis Ventures, and Shasta Ventures, according to Crunchbase.

The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. Data.World was most recently valued at $350 million in the company’s 2022 $50 million Series C round, per PitchBook.

Gaurav Rewari, an SVP and GM of data analytics at ServiceNow, told TechCrunch that ServiceNow was looking for companies they could partner with that would help customers deploy AI at scale. Specifically, ServiceNow was looking to give businesses better resources to make their data “AI-ready.”

“As I like to say, this path to agentic ‘AI heaven’ goes through some form of data hell, and that’s the grim reality,” Rewari said.

He added that Data.World was the right choice to help ServiceNow customers with this problem because Data.World helps enterprises organize and easily search through their data. The addition of Data.World’s data governance tools will help customers get the most out of their AI agents and other forms of AI automation, Rewari said.

“We looked at a bunch of companies and came away so impressed with what they had built,” he added. “We felt that the whole journey that they were on, with respect to metadata management [and] knowledge-based infrastructure, to provide cataloging of data across the vast enterprise and the governance of that data itself — that could be an extremely important addition to our product portfolio.”

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Rewari said that once the deal closes, Data.World will begin integrating into ServiceNow, with Data.World’s platform being offered as a product to ServiceNow customers in the near future.

It’s ServiceNow’s second acquisition in recent months.

ServiceNow announced in March that it agreed to acquire Moveworks, which develops enterprise-focused automation and AI tools, for $2.85 billion.

These acquisitions all fit nicely into ServiceNow’s plan to embrace agentic AI and the tools required to build it. In March 2024, ServiceNow SVP of corporate business development, Philip Kirk, told TechCrunch that ServiceNow was going to approach the transition to agentic AI through a mix of building and buying capabilities.

“It is kind of three-dimensional chess right now to figure out whether to build, buy, or partner,” Kirk said at the time. “I think the biggest thing that we try to prioritize is how we can make decisions that are in the long-term best interest of our customers, and that differentiate us from what we know we’re world-class at, which is enterprise automation in our platform.”

Updated 10:09 a.m. Pacific: An earlier version of this article referred to Data.World as “Declan.” ServiceNow provided TechCrunch with a blog post that used this name, which a spokesperson later said is internal product nomenclature and shouldn’t have been published. We regret the error.