Prukalpa Sankar turned a data-for-good startup’s internal tools into Atlan

Some of the best products are not invented for a market; they are extracted from a team that had no choice but to build them to do its own work. Atlan is one of those. It began as the internal tooling that Prukalpa Sankar and her co-founder Varun Banka built to run data projects at their earlier company, SocialCops, and only became a product once they realised every other data team in the world had the same problem they had already solved for themselves.

That origin matters. Atlan is not an India-market company that later went global; it is a globally-scoped data company that happened to be founded by an India-born entrepreneur, selling to large enterprises worldwide and backed by investors including GIC and Salesforce Ventures. For Indian women founders looking at deep, technical, globally-competitive categories, Sankar’s path is one of the clearest available templates.

The background: engineering, then a deliberate detour

Prukalpa Sankar studied chemical and biomolecular engineering, with an entrepreneurship focus, at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Before founding her own company she had brief stints in large institutions including Goldman Sachs and ExxonMobil, the kind of resume that usually leads toward a safe corporate track. She left it to build something in data instead.

That choice is itself instructive. The interesting founders are rarely the ones who never had a safe option; they are the ones who had a very safe option and walked away from it early, before the opportunity cost felt unbearable.

2013: SocialCops, data for the public interest

In 2013, while still early in her career, Sankar co-founded SocialCops with NTU batchmate Varun Banka. SocialCops was a data-intelligence company oriented toward the public interest: helping governments, development organisations and large institutions collect, clean and act on data. Its work included large-scale public data projects in India, the kind of engagements where the data is messy, the stakes are real, and the systems have to actually work in the field rather than in a demo.

To do that work at scale, the team had to build its own internal infrastructure: tools to find the right dataset, understand where it came from, trust it, and collaborate on it across analysts and engineers. SocialCops ran this tooling across hundreds of data projects. In effect, the company spent years stress-testing a data-collaboration system on some of the hardest possible problems, before anyone thought of it as a product.

2018: spinning the internal tooling into Atlan

By 2018, the founders had a realisation that is obvious in hindsight and rare in practice: the internal system that made their own data team effective was the actual company. Every modern data team, in every industry, anywhere in the world, was drowning in the same problem: scattered data, no shared context, no trust, endless manual coordination between analysts, engineers and business users. That became Atlan.

Atlan is best described as a collaboration and governance layer for data, a control plane that sits across an organisation’s data stack and lets teams discover, understand, trust and govern their data in one place. Because it was forged on real, painful internal use rather than designed speculatively, it arrived with an opinion about how data teams should actually work, which is difficult to fake.

The funding arc: from $2.5M to a $750M valuation

Atlan’s capital story tracks its category catching up to it. The company raised an early round of around $2.5 million in 2019. In March 2022 it raised a roughly $50 million Series B at about a $450 million valuation, with investors including Salesforce Ventures, Insight Partners and Sequoia Capital India. In May 2024 it raised a $105 million Series C at about a $750 million valuation, led by GIC, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, and Meritech Capital, with existing investors participating. Total funding has been reported at more than $200 million.

The customer base is the more telling metric. Atlan’s users include large global enterprises across technology, media, financial and consumer sectors. This is not a company selling primarily into the Indian market with global ambitions stapled on; it competes for enterprise data budgets worldwide, which is a far harder game and a far larger one.

The pivot most founders get wrong

Atlan is, technically, a pivot, the team’s attention moved from SocialCops to a new company. But it is the opposite of the pivot that usually destroys startups. The destructive pivot is the one made out of desperation: the original idea is not working, so the team jumps to an unrelated idea it does not understand, carrying none of its earned advantage with it. Atlan was the other kind. The team did not abandon its expertise; it recognised that the most valuable thing it had built was not the data-for-good work itself but the system that made that work possible, and it carried that hard-won understanding into the new company intact.

This is the part founders most often get wrong. They treat the visible product as the asset and the internal machinery as overhead. Frequently it is the reverse: the unglamorous tooling a team had to build to function is the thing the rest of the world would pay for, because it encodes years of real problem-solving that a competitor starting from a blank page cannot shortcut. Recognising that requires a founder to look at her own company and ask not “what are we selling?” but “what did we have to build to survive, and does everyone else need it too?”

Building a global company from outside the obvious places

There is a quiet structural lesson in Atlan that is easy to miss because the company makes it look natural. Enterprise data infrastructure is a category historically dominated by companies headquartered in a few well-known technology hubs, selling to buyers who tend to trust vendors that look familiar. Atlan competes for those same global enterprise budgets without being anchored to that geography. It did not treat India as a smaller, safer market to win first and the world as a distant aspiration; it scoped itself to the problem, which is global, and built the credibility to sell into it.

Part of how that credibility was built is non-obvious: Sankar became one of the most-read voices on how modern data teams should actually operate. In a technical enterprise category, buyers trust vendors who have visibly done the work and can articulate the problem better than the buyer can. Writing and speaking about the category was not a marketing flourish layered on top of the product; it was distribution and trust-building in a market where a thin founder narrative is a real disadvantage. For women founders in technical fields, who are statistically under-credited in exactly these rooms by default, owning the public articulation of your own category is not optional polish. It is leverage that partially offsets a structural bias.

What the funding trajectory actually signals

It is tempting to read Atlan’s funding history, a small early round, then a Series B at roughly a $450 million valuation, then a Series C at roughly $750 million, as the story. It is not the story; it is the lagging indicator of the story. The sequence is what it looks like when a category the founders understood early finally becomes urgent for everyone else. The rise of large language models made the quality, discoverability and governance of enterprise data existentially important to companies that had been able to ignore it before. Atlan did not pivot into that moment; the moment arrived at a company that had been building for it since 2018. The capital followed the timing; it did not create it.

What Indian women founders can take from the Atlan story

The first lesson is about where products come from. Atlan was not the output of a brainstorm about a hot market; it was extracted from years of real internal pain solved for a team that needed it to function. Founders chasing the “right” idea often overlook the most defensible one, the system they already had to build to get their own work done. That system has a moat because it was earned, not imagined.

The second is about scope. Sankar built a company that competes globally in a technical enterprise category from the start, rather than treating India as the ceiling and the world as a stretch goal. For Indian women founders in deep tech, data and AI, the relevant frame is not “build for India first.” It is “build for the problem, wherever it exists, and let the customer base be global because the problem is.”

The third is quieter. Sankar is also one of the most-read writers on how modern data teams should work. Building a public body of thinking around your category is not vanity; it is distribution and credibility in a technical market where buyers trust people who have clearly done the work. For women founders especially, who are often under-credited by default in technical rooms, owning the narrative of your own category is leverage.

Frequently asked questions about Prukalpa Sankar and Atlan

Who is Prukalpa Sankar?

Prukalpa Sankar is an India-born entrepreneur who co-founded the data-intelligence startup SocialCops in 2013 and then co-founded Atlan in 2018, both with Varun Banka. She is a co-founder of Atlan, a data-collaboration platform used by global enterprises, and is widely recognised as a speaker and writer on modern data teams.

What is the relationship between SocialCops and Atlan?

Atlan grew out of internal tooling built at SocialCops, a data-for-good company whose work included large public-data projects in India. The team realised the internal systems that made their own data work efficient could help data teams everywhere, and that idea became Atlan, founded in 2018.

How much has Atlan raised?

Atlan raised an early round of about $2.5 million in 2019, a roughly $50 million Series B in March 2022 at about a $450 million valuation led by investors including Salesforce Ventures, Insight Partners and Sequoia Capital India, and a $105 million Series C in May 2024 at about a $750 million valuation led by GIC and Meritech Capital. Total funding has been reported at more than $200 million.

What does Atlan do?

Atlan is a data-collaboration and governance platform, often described as a control plane for data, that helps enterprise data teams discover, manage, trust and govern their data. Its customers include large global companies across technology, media and consumer sectors.

What is Prukalpa Sankar’s net worth?

There is no net-worth figure for Prukalpa Sankar from a reputable, independently-verifiable source. Atlan raised $105 million at a roughly $750 million valuation (2024), that is a company valuation, not a personal net worth, and no credible personal figure is reported. The numbers that appear on celebrity or “net worth” aggregator sites are unsourced and inconsistent, so, in line with our editorial policy,