Equity Investment Signals Deeper Snowflake Alliance With ‘Data Trust’ Provider Ataccama

Snowflake Ventures has made a strategic investment in Ataccama, a data governance and quality management tech developer, with plans to continue to leverage integrations between the two companies’ platforms at a time of rising demand for high-quality data for AI applications and agents.

AI data platform company Snowflake has made a strategic investment in Ataccama, a leading developer of data quality management and governance technology that’s playing an increasingly important role in preparing data for AI systems.

The funding, which comes from Snowflake Ventures, the company’s investment arm, deepens an existing relationship between Snowflake and Ataccama and signals “a shared commitment to delivering trusted, explainable data that drives enterprise AI, advanced analytics, and regulatory compliance across the Snowflake AI Data Cloud,” the companies said in a news release announcing the investment.

The dollar value of Snowflake’s equity investment was not disclosed.

Ataccama, based in Boston, has long focused on providing the data quality and governance capabilities businesses need for regulatory compliance and for improving data quality for business analytics tasks.

But with the wave of development and implementation of AI applications and AI agents, the demand for managing data quality has soared, said Ataccama CEO Mike McKee (pictured) in an interview with CRN.

“Everything has accelerated because of the fact that business is now so intent on making sure they can trust the data,” he said. “Not just for regulatory compliance and not just for making better business decisions and analytics, but for feeding the large language models and driving AI.”

Ataccama One, the company’s flagship platform, provides a range of data management capabilities with an emphasis on data quality and data governance functionality, along with data lineage, data catalog, master data management and data observability tools.

The company’s product lineup also includes Ataccama One AI and its agentic AI capabilities for data management, Ataccama Cloud, and a portfolio of data connectors.

Snowflake-Ataccama Platform Links

Ataccama already has a significant technology alliance with Snowflake with Ataccama’s platform integrated with the Snowflake AI Data Cloud. Ataccama provides a Snowflake-native data quality management application that data engineers use to validate the quality of their data within the Snowflake platform.

“We invest in partners where we’ve already seen clear success and a shared commitment to building deeply on Snowflake. Ataccama has demonstrated strong traction with joint customers, and this investment allows us to build on that momentum with even deeper integrations, unlocking more value for both companies,” said Harsha Kapre, director of Snowflake Ventures, in an emailed response to questions from CRN.

“In an AI-driven world, trusted, well-governed data is essential. Ataccama enables our customers to work with accurate, explainable data that powers Snowflake Cortex AI and underpins agentic AI experiences like Snowflake Intelligence. A more natively integrated solution means trusted insights, faster time to value, and greater confidence in AI-driven innovation,” Kapre said.

Ataccama’s software is linked to various components of the Snowflake platform, bringing data quality features to Snowflake Cortex AI workflows, for example, and extending the functionality of the Snowflake Horizon Catalog—such as data health monitoring—by bringing continuous compliance and automated data quality controls directly into Snowflake AI pipelines.

The Ataccama software plays a critical role in Snowflake’s Medallion architecture that organizes data into Bronze, Silver and Gold logical layers to progressively improve data quality and reliability as it moves from raw ingestion to a business-ready state, according to the companies.

McKee noted that while the volume of data used for AI is growing exponentially, the human resources needed to manage the quality and veracity of that data is not.

“It’s a business imperative to be competitive in today’s world, to leverage data [and] leverage AI. The challenge is there’s not enough people to do that, so the data management process has to become more automated,” he said.

Ataccama, meanwhile, has been building more generative AI and agentic AI capabilities into its own platform to improve its effectiveness and make it easier to use. “We need AI to make AI work,” McKee said.

More Than A Financial Investment

Ataccama is privately held with ownership split between its founders, employees, Bain Capital (which invested $150 million in the company in June 2022), and now Snowflake.

The funding from Snowflake will provide Ataccama with additional resources to continue its expansion and develop additional integrations between the two companies’ platforms. But McKee said the real value of the equity investment is the signal it sends to the market about the two companies’ alliance and the value provided to customers through their technical integrations.

“Snowflake’s primary objective is to get deeper technical integration,” McKee said. “It’s the strategic relationship behind [the investment] that’s significant. It allows us to work more closely to make sure the products that we’re delivering help the customers trust their data. … We’re all on that mission together, trying to help customers to be able to trust that data so they can make better decisions faster.”

“We are focused on backing partners that meaningfully expand what customers can do with Snowflake, and this partnership brings our technologies and teams even closer,” Snowflake’s Kapre said about the significance of the Snowflake-Ataccama alliance.

“With this investment, customers can expect deeper generative AI capabilities running natively on Cortex AI, including natural language experiences for data quality tasks. It builds on Snowflake Horizon Catalog by enabling organizations to monitor data health and quality, while managing logic through Ataccama. Looking ahead, the partnership envisions agentic workflows in which AI agents proactively identify and propose fixes for data quality issues via Model Context Protocol integrations,” he said.

In the press statement announcing the Snowflake investment, Ataccama said demand for its products amid the wave of AI development has driven the company’s growth over the past three years and that it has achieved a 30 percent compound annual growth rate.

In the channel, Ataccama works with a range of consulting, service and reseller partners including industry giants such as Accenture, Cognizant, EPAM, Perficient, Slalom and Tiger Analytics.

Last week Snowflake unveiled a new multiyear, $200 million partnership with AI research and development company Anthropic through which Snowflake is making Anthropic’s Claude AI models available through the Snowflake platform. Snowflake is also using Claude to serve as a key AI model powering Snowflake Intelligence, the company’s enterprise intelligence agent.