Matillion Raises $150M at $1.5B Valuation - Low-Code Data Integration

The Critical Role of Data in Modern Business

Data is fundamental to the operation of contemporary businesses and the technology companies supporting them. It serves as a vital tool for informed decision-making, performance evaluation, and the development of next-generation services.

However, data management can present significant challenges. Organizations often grapple with excessive volumes of data, dispersed across numerous locations, making it a complex undertaking to organize effectively.

Introducing Matillion: A Data Harnessing Platform

Matillion is a startup that has developed a platform designed to help companies effectively utilize their data. Notably, this platform isn’t solely intended for data scientists; it’s built using a low-code approach, broadening its accessibility to a wider range of users.

The company recently announced a substantial investment round – $150 million, resulting in a $1.5 billion valuation – demonstrating both Matillion’s success and the strong market demand for its technology.

A Growing Customer Base and Investment

Currently, Matillion serves “hundreds” of large enterprise clients. These include prominent organizations such as Western Union, FOX, Sony, Slack, National Grid, Peet’s Coffee, and Cisco, utilizing the platform for projects spanning business intelligence to advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning applications.

This funding round is led by General Atlantic, with participation from Battery Ventures, Sapphire Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, and Lightspeed Venture Partners – all leading investors in the enterprise startup space.

Matillion previously secured a Series D funding round of approximately $100 million in February of this year, though the valuation was not disclosed at that time.

A Rising Tech Hub: Manchester's Innovation

This latest valuation is noteworthy not only for Matillion but also for its origins. Founded in Manchester, with an additional base in Denver, the company is one of a growing number of tech startups from the city – including The Hut Group, Peak AI, and Fractory – achieving significant success and establishing Manchester as a burgeoning center for innovation.

Addressing the Challenges of Big Data

Matthew Scullion, CEO and founder of Matillion, emphasizes that the core issue they address is the untapped potential of big data. Organizations generate vast amounts of data daily, representing substantial value if efficiently accessed.

However, this data is frequently scattered across diverse sources – often exceeding 1,000 within large organizations – residing in various cloud environments, servers, and storage solutions like Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, and Databricks.

Furthermore, while much of this data is structured, these sources are often not aligned with one another.

Data as Currency and the Need for Accessibility

“Data has become the new currency, and the world is pivoting to that,” Scullion stated. “This shift is impacting all aspects of work and is happening rapidly. However, the ability to innovate with data is often limited.”

He clarifies that the issue isn’t a lack of data or demand, but rather the capacity to make that data practically useful.

Matillion's ETL Solution

Matillion provides a framework and system that identifies data sources and organizes them without requiring data relocation. As an ETL (extract, transform and load) provider, it operates within a competitive market alongside companies like Dataiku, Talent, SnapLogic, and cloud providers such as AWS and Microsoft.

Scullion highlights Matillion’s key differentiator: its democratized platform. This allows organizations to leverage data without solely relying on data scientists, thanks to its low-code interface.

Empowering Citizen Data Scientists

“We have made it accessible, intuitive and easy to use by bringing in a low-code approach,” Scullion explained. “We’ve developed a platform and data operating system that has all the things in the kit bag that an organization needs to make it useful.”

As big data analytics and related tools become more mainstream and adopt low-code interfaces, Matillion empowers less technical users to access and utilize data. This translates to increased efficiency, reduced costs, and allows data scientists to focus on more complex challenges.

Industry Recognition and Future Growth

“As organizations look for ways to harness data to make better business decisions, the market for cloud data integration and transformation is expanding,” said Chris Caulkin, managing director and head of Technology for EMEA at General Atlantic.

“We believe that Matillion’s low-code ETL platform simplifies the process of constructing data pipelines and preparing data for analysis, enabling citizen data scientists and data engineers alike to play a valuable role in extracting data-based insights. We look forward to supporting the team through its next phase of growth and expansion.”