We are happy to announce a $150 million minority investment by Bain Capital Tech Opportunities into Ataccama. This is another major milestone for Ataccama that makes us both proud and humbled.
Read on to learn more about the investment, what it means for Ataccama and our customers, and where we plan to go from here.
Who is Bain Capital Tech Opportunities?
Founded in 1984 as a Boston-based private equity firm, Bain Capital pioneers the consulting-based approach to private investing, partners closely with management teams to offer insights that challenge conventional thinking, and builds great businesses while improving operations. Today, Bain Capital has 1,300+ employees, including more than 500 investment professionals, all striving to create value through private equity, public equity, fixed income and credit, real estate, and venture capital investments across multiple sectors, industries, and geographies.
Bain Capital founded Bain Capital Tech Opportunities in 2019 to invest and partner with world-class growth technology companies to help them reach their full potential. Tech Opportunities has a dedicated, tenured team with deep experience supporting growing technology businesses, including data management and governance. Tech Opportunities also benefits from the global reach, resources, and technology experience of the broader Bain Capital platform.
Why are we bringing on an investor?
The data management market is booming. We have recently seen a surge in demand for our solutions, and we doubled our annual recurring revenue (ARR) in 2021.
As companies are re-architecting their data stacks and rethinking their data strategies to enjoy the benefits of data democratization and decentralized governance, they need core components like a data catalog, a data quality solution, and MDM as enablers for such initiatives. We see a massive opportunity in providing these with our unified data management platform, Ataccama ONE.
As Dewey Awad, Managing Director at Bain Capital Tech Opportunities, puts it, "It's clear that businesses prioritize greater control over their data across hybrid and cloud environments, with the ability to derive deeper and more accurate insights from that data. This demand is occurring across the organization, requiring an intuitive data management system for employees across multiple functions and departments."
To support the increased demand of the past few years, we have put more resources into product innovation and go-to-market functions such as marketing, sales, partner success, and customer care. And in 2020, we began the search for an investor to support these efforts and scale them even further.
While there was very high interest from the investor market, we partnered with Bain Capital Tech Opportunities because the Bain team brings much more than funding to the table. Bain Capital Tech Opportunities offers deep expertise in the data management and governance markets, a wide network, and significant experience in growing and scaling companies. In addition to the financial investment, Bain Capital Tech Opportunities will serve as a trusted advisor to Ataccama.
How will we use the investment?
Product innovation is a top priority. We want to add more automation and augment the user experience. We also plan to scale our operations related to the product to expedite customer onboarding and dramatically reduce time to value.
Finally, we’ll be working to build out Ataccama’s go-to-market functions through various initiatives, including greater investment into strategic partnerships like Snowflake, growing our marketing & sales organizations, and enhancing customer care.
What does Bain Capital Tech Opportunities bring to Ataccama aside from capital?
Bain Capital Tech Opportunities is known for marrying its investment expertise with deep operational and strategic capabilities. They will work closely with Michael and our management team to develop unique value creation plans and bring specialists in go-to-market strategy, talent development, M&A, product development, and operations to help Ataccama reach its full potential.
Why did Bain Capital Tech Opportunities choose Ataccama?
Bain Capital Tech Opportunities sees Ataccama as ideally positioned to take advantage of the rising tide of data democratization, automation, and decentralization in the data management and governance space.
Dewey Awad, Managing Director at Bain Capital Tech Opportunities, explains, "Over the past two years, Ataccama has seen significant demand and momentum since launching Ataccama ONE Gen2, which unifies multiple disciplines into a single AI-enabled platform. We are excited to partner with Michal and his team to double down on product innovation and go-to-market to accelerate the major whitespace opportunities they see in nearly every industry.”
Product Quality
Bain Capital highlighted several Ataccama differentiators that set us apart from other vendors in the data management and governance space, including:
- Ease of use and self-serve configurability, which enables individual teams to take greater responsibility for their data
- Natively built solution that unifies several data management disciplines into a single end-to-end platform (data quality, data governance, data catalog, master data management)
- Easy to implement with out-of-the-box rules and minimal customization
- Advanced AI/ML for automated data profiling, rule creation, anomaly detection, and glossary classification
- Exceptional customer service and support
Customer satisfaction
Bain Capital Tech Opportunities speaks to dozens of customers and industry experts as part of its investment process and found that Ataccama had best-in-class customer satisfaction compared to competitors. “Ataccama’s cloud-friendly, best-in-class platform makes it simple for technical and non-technical roles to collaborate on data quality. It’s incredibly compelling to hear the exceptional feedback Ataccama receives from its customers, which is evidenced by best-in-class retention metrics and powerful ARR growth,” said Awad.
Organization and talent quality
Bain Capital Tech Opportunities engages third-party advisors to evaluate the maturity of its product and technology functions and found that Ataccama had a talented R&D organization and high-quality codebase. Results mention that “[Ataccama is] one of the highest functioning R&D organizations we’ve run into” and that the quality of our code is “second to none.”
What does this mean for the future of Ataccama?
Receiving this funding is only the beginning. What lies ahead is challenging and creative work. We will re-engineer and improve internal processes to scale the company and our offering while continuing to innovate and grow our revenue.
With the release of Ataccama ONE Gen2 in 2020, we demonstrated the immense value of using metadata and data together. The investment from Bain Capital Tech Opportunities will propel us to the forefront of the unified data management platform market.
Want to learn more about the future of data management, get a sneak peek of the latest Ataccama innovations, and get trained? Attend Data People Summit.
