Meeting exploding demand for cloud data integration: Manchester-based Matillion secures £72.24M funding
Decentralising information becomes a necessity when one wants to access data from anywhere around the world. Cloud computing enables a way to do this and there’s been a huge shift in companies migrating to the cloud to help their workforce carry on from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the notable names in cloud data integration platforms is the Manchester-based startup Matillion.
The company offers its services for making data useful for businesses. It also helps data engineers, data scientists and business analysts to incorporate all of their data in analytics and decision making, from any cloud platform. The UK startup has now announced securing a whopping £72.24 million in a latest funding round. In a conversation with UKTN, the company’s CEO Matthew Scullion, reveals more about the company, its future plans, challenges, goals and more.
Accessing untapped market opportunities
The latest £72.24 million Series D funding round for Matillion was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. In addition, Battery Ventures, Sapphire Ventures, Scale Venture Partners and Silicon Valley Bank Capital also participated in the funding round. The company aims to meet the “exploding demand” for cloud data integration for global organisations such as Amazon, Siemens, Subway, Novartis, Slack, and Accenture, with the freshly acquired funds.
Commenting on how Matillion will utilise the funds, Scullion says, “There’s still a largely untapped market opportunity, particularly in the enterprise segment, where we focus. The funding will be invested in our growth to support enterprise customers and their cloud data projects, continue to innovate and accelerate the capabilities of our platform. We will also launch new products and features that increase productivity and improve time to value for our customers.”
Making data accessible for a massive audience
Matillion accelerates the time to value for modern enterprises with its cloud data integration platform. The platform extracts and transforms data so that it is helpful and can be directly used by companies, data scientists and more from any cloud platform.
“There’s a massive market for middleware built for cloud data platforms, and that’s what we do.” says Scullion. “Specifically, there’s an addressable market worth £2.23 billion for data integration, the growth of which has come from demand for cloud migration, among other factors. At Matillion, we help enterprises in this space that move to the cloud and need insights faster using the data within their organisation.”
The market Matillion serves already has some players that are its competition. Scullion notes that the company’s main competitors are ETL solutions providers such as Informatica and Talend. However, there are multiple solutions available that range from on-premises to the cloud. “The problem with legacy ETL solutions is that they weren’t built for the cloud, and they lack the speed and scalability needed to deliver data-driven insights in the modern business environment. Matillion also focuses on the needs of data teams, as well as analytics teams, to facilitate the democratisation of organisations’ most valuable asset, data.” Scullion remarks.
COVID accelerating tech adoption
With work from home being the new norm, it’s not surprising to hear that tech adoption has picked up speed for many companies. As the organisation shifted to remote work settings, digital transformations that were supposed to take years were pulled off in mere months. “As a data integration company, we’ve seen continued growth. Internally, we’ve always been a digital-first company. With our two headquarters separated by thousands of miles, team members working remotely in both countries, and customers in over 40+ countries, we’ve succeeded because of our digital-first approach.” notes Scullion.
The company says its solutions are uniquely positioned to help multiple companies, agencies, and governments in the fight against COVID-19. “From pharma to biotech, we could provide analytics-ready datasets for those seeking to understand the impact of the virus and make swift, reliable decisions – from infection rate analysis and even data-informed allocation of personal protective equipment (PPE),” Scullion adds.
Solving tactical challenges and expanding the team
Almost all startups have their fair share of challenges to deal with. For Matillion, the notable challenges entail taking note of scalability and cost, solving tactical challenges and focusing on their customer’s needs. Expounding upon the first bit of the problems, Scullion says, “Taking a note of scalability and cost is crucial. Matillion is built for the cloud and therefore enterprises can take full advantage of the cloud’s power, flexibility and economics to integrate with modern cloud data platforms, such as Snowflake, Amazon Redshift and Databricks Delta Lake.”
Many companies are said to face a big “tactical challenge” when attempting to connect all of their data sources. “Now, instead of asking vendors, ‘Do you have a connector for this data source?’, customers can use Matillion ETL to connect to virtually any data source that exists,” Scullion notes. He further adds, “We also focus on what our customers use and charge them accordingly. Whereas some vendors put limits on the amount of data or processes, a customer can store or use, Matillion is the opposite using a pay-as-you-go model.”
Matillion has its base setup in the UK and the US. The latest funds will also help the startup expand its team in both the countries and as per Scullion, the team will be expanded to double the number of employees before 2021 ends. As per Scullion, the company’s goal is “to become an entity of consequence that sits at the intersection of data and the visceral need of every company to become data-driven.”
