Tiger Global, Shasta Ventures, and Accel Back Ascend.io’s Advanced Data Automation Cloud to Dramatically Increase Data Team Productivity
MENLO PARK, Calif. – April 6, 2022 – Ascend.io, the Data Automation Cloud, today announced $31 million in Series B funding led by Tiger Global with participation from Shasta Ventures and existing investor Accel. The additional capital will be used by Ascend.io to scale go-to-market efforts and expansion into new geographies, as well as extend Ascend’s Data Automation Cloud to support full multi-cloud data mesh automation.
“Backing Ascend.io is an exciting move for us,” said Issac Roth, Managing Director at Shasta Ventures. “We are bullish on the data ecosystem as a whole and it is increasingly clear that Ascend.io’s innovative approach to automation addresses the rapidly growing and presently unmet needs of the market. Their growth numbers and customer satisfaction are inspiring, and we are excited to partner with them on this journey.”
The steady rise of AI, machine learning, and analytics powering today’s hyperconnected world has spiked demand for data workloads and has progressively strained data team bandwidth and productivity. To meet this demand, companies are increasingly looking to data automation and adopting the Ascend Data Automation Cloud to accelerate the speed and scale at which data initiatives are delivered. Ascend.io’s automation platform has gained significant favor amongst data engineering and analytics teams with its ability to dramatically enhance the full spectrum of data engineering capabilities, bolstering productivity and impact of the entire data team.
Data automation needs span a diverse and growing data ecosystem and companies require a solution that ensures they can keep pace with data’s rapidly expanding landscape. The Ascend Data Automation Cloud unifies the core data engineering capabilities—ingestion, transformation, delivery, orchestration, and observability—into a seamless experience. Powered by Ascend’s DataAware™ intelligence, the Ascend Data Automation Cloud eliminates more than 90% of custom code, empowering data teams to focus on what matters the most: data. The Ascend platform works continuously in the background monitoring data integrity and optimizing data workloads, resulting in drastically reduced time spent on management and maintenance.
Rapid Adoption of Ascend Data Automation Cloud Results in 4x User Growth, 7x Revenue Growth
Ascend.io’s leadership in data engineering and automation is highlighted by key milestones from the last twelve months, including 4x growth in users and 7x growth in revenue. Additionally, with the first annual Data Automation Summit happening April 13-14, 2022, Ascend.io is leading the charge to advance the data community’s conversation around the importance of data automation.
“At Ascend.io, our focus on data engineering productivity has truly resonated with customers, and we’re seeing faster growth across our user base than ever before,” said Sean Knapp, CEO and Founder of Ascend.io. “This latest round of funding enables us to help even more data teams around the globe take advantage of this new wave of automation, ensuring they have a leg up as they drive innovation in their respective industries.”
Company Previews Platform Expansion and Next-generation Data Mesh Automation
As the modern data stack expands further to encompass data lakes, data warehouses, and clouds, achieving unified access and continuity for robust data workloads requires increasingly advanced data automation to guarantee data integrity and confidence in the data systems. Ascend.io is excited to preview the development of data mesh automation for workloads spanning all clouds, lakes, and warehouses—offering not only a single pane of glass view, but also unified metadata, lineage, observability, and more. More information on this functionality and availability is expected later this year. Additionally, en route to full data mesh automation, Ascend.io will expand support for lakes and warehouses from currently supported platforms Spark, Snowflake, and Google BigQuery to also include Amazon Redshift, AWS Glue, Microsoft Azure Synapse, and more.
“At Ascend.io, our focus on data engineering productivity has truly resonated with customers, and we’re seeing faster growth across our user base than ever before,” said Sean Knapp, CEO and Founder of Ascend.io. “This latest round of funding enables us to help even more data teams around the globe take advantage of this new wave of automation, ensuring they have a leg up as they drive innovation in their respective industries.”
Tom Weeks Joins the Board of Directors
Ascend.io’s Chief Business Officer Tom Weeks has joined the Board of Directors and has spearheaded the company’s go-to-market efforts since he joined the executive team in mid-2018. Prior to his role at Ascend.io, Weeks held a variety of executive roles at companies including ThoughtSpot, Apigee (IPO), Skire (acquired by Oracle), Business Objects (acquired by SAP), and more.
“I’ve had the opportunity to see multiple waves of data technology innovation throughout my career, and the groundswell around data automation is especially exciting for many reasons,” said Weeks. “During my tenure at Ascend.io, I’ve spoken daily with companies looking for ways to improve their data engineering processes and productivity, and the conversation always comes down to the performance gains and ROI benefits Ascend.io’s advanced automation capabilities deliver. I’m thrilled to be an ever bigger part of the Ascend.io team at the forefront of advancing automation for data teams.”
To learn more about Ascend.io and the Data Automation Cloud, please visit www.ascend.io/. t
