--- title: "About Us | What is Atlan - The Context Layer for AI" url: "https://atlan.com/about/" description: "We are building the context layer that makes AI useful - the infrastructure for Contextual Intelligence, the next frontier of enterprise AI." --- > Atlan is hosting Context Conference, bringing together the leaders and builders at the frontier of giving AI the context it needs to understand their business. It runs online on October 28, 2026, from 11:00 AM to 2:00 PM ET. Atlan co-founder Prukalpa Sankar opens and closes the day. Leaders from AstraZeneca, BNY and Verizon share why they invest in context and what they get from it. Registrants get early access to The AI Context Gap, a new study from MIT Technology Review Insights. Register: https://atlan.com/context-conference/ Atlan's About page: **Intelligence without context is not intelligence at all.** We are building the context layer that makes AI useful. The page carries the founders' note on Contextual Intelligence and the company's story from 2020 to 2026. ## Founder's note The dominant AI narrative has a blind spot. It treats intelligence as a general-purpose capability: something you can measure on benchmarks and deploy universally. But we'd never accept that logic for a human. Your best hire wasn't exceptional because of their test scores. They became exceptional by applying their intelligence in context. Learning the environment, absorbing what was unspoken, understanding what mattered to whom and why. We call this learning on the job and we've never given AI the same foundation. So we get the numbers we deserve: MIT found only 5% of generative AI pilots achieve revenue acceleration. IDC reports 88% never reach production. The models are brilliant, but they struggle in enterprises. **The fault is not in the models. The fault is in how we think about intelligence.** Intelligence is never general. It is always for something, in some situation, for some purpose. What makes it useful is Contextual Intelligence: the quality of AI reasoning that emerges when a system operates with full knowledge of the environment it's in. This is the next frontier. We are building the company brain that takes AI from smart to useful. - Prukalpa & Varun (Prukalpa Sankar and Varun Banka, co-founders and co-CEOs) ## Our story ### 2020 - The Context Layer for Data **Atlan's founding story.** Before Atlan, we were a data team tackling ambitious data projects for the UN, the Gates Foundation, and the Government of India. But internally, every day felt like chaos. We realized that every time data moved across teams or tools, context was lost. We launched Atlan publicly in 2020 as the context layer for data, with the belief that shared context would help the humans of data do their life's best work. ### 2023 - The First AI Agent for Context **Launching Atlan AI.** Atlan AI was the first AI agent to create context, built in partnership with Microsoft Azure and OpenAI. It generated descriptions and READMEs for data assets based on SQL logic. Our customers loved it, generating 290K descriptions in a year with a 90% acceptance rate. "Atlan AI changed how we approach documentation - instead of a never-ending backlog, our analysts trust AI-generated descriptions enough to make decisions on them every day." - Oliver Gomes, VP, Analytics & Strategy, Fox **The scaling problem.** Atlan AI was built for human-assisted workflows, where humans could review every AI output. But to make enterprise AI useful, we needed more context than humans could manually write or even review with Atlan AI. And enabling this needed a new kind of underlying infrastructure that no existing catalog or graph could solve. ### 2024 - Rebuilding Context Infrastructure for the AI Era **Building the Context Lakehouse.** Until then, all context infrastructure - data catalogs, business glossaries, wikis - was designed for humans. AI had changed that equation. Agents were now producing and consuming context. We rebuilt our infrastructure from the ground up and introduced the Context Lakehouse: the first context infrastructure architecture built for the AI era. Iceberg-native, open, and built for agent speed. **Series C.** We raised $105 million led by GIC and Meritech Capital to build the context layer for AI, bringing total funding to over $200 million. Revenue grew 7x over two years. Enterprise sales grew 400% in Q1 2024. Competitive win rate: 75%. ### 2025 - The Only Leader Across Every Context Category - **2x Leader and Customer Favorite in The Forrester Wave:** named a Leader for Enterprise Data Catalogs and Data Governance Solutions. - **Customer Favourite in G2:** Leader for six consecutive quarters, ranked #1 across five categories. - **2x Leader in Gartner Magic Quadrants:** named a Leader in the Magic Quadrant for Metadata Management Solutions and Data & Analytics Governance Platforms. ### 2025 - The First Ever Conference on Context **The world's leading AI teams.** Re:Govern, the world's first conference on context, brought together data and AI leaders from Mastercard, Workday, CME Group, General Motors, Virgin Media O2, Nasdaq, GitLab, Dropbox, Elastic, easyJet, and more. ### 2026 - The Infrastructure for Contextual Intelligence - **Context Lakehouse:** Atlan's context lakehouse has become the primary consumption interface for AI agents operating with context (the card's graphic reads "8 Billion Reads in the Last 90 Days"). - **Context Agents:** Context Agents hit a tipping point. In just two weeks across 50+ enterprises, they produced four times the volume of documentation those organizations had written by hand in an entire year. Stats: 1.03M descriptions generated; 87% human parity quality; 110k+ hours saved; 50+ enterprises active. - **Context Engineering Studio:** AI teams at Workday and Fox achieved a 5x improvement in AI accuracy by engineering context the way AI actually needs it: versioned, tested, and deployable across every agent simultaneously. - **Frontier Labs:** We opened Frontier Labs, an open laboratory for AI-native company building. The experiments behind rebuilding Atlan around AI, published as they happen: what worked, what didn't, and the real record of humans and agents building together. [Notes from the frontier](https://atlan.com/frontier/) ## Intelligence, without context, isn't intelligence at all. [Book a Demo](https://atlan.com/forms/talk-to-sales-contact/)