Investing in Matillion, a Rising Star in Cloud Data Integration and Transformation

Large global enterprises in every industry are increasingly migrating data to the cloud for analysis, to generate better insights and make more informed decisions. Global data volumes are expected to grow at 24% CAGR over the next five years, and data workloads in the cloud are expected to grow nearly 65% by 2023. Meanwhile, the cloud data platform Snowflake grew 100% year-over-year in the quarter ending July 31, demonstrating customers’ appetite to analyze their data in the cloud.

These initiatives are often hampered by siloed legacy systems that cross-communicate poorly if at all, however. To analyze data, enterprises must extract it from different systems and render it into a form that can be analyzed―which is more difficult when legacy “extract, transform, and load” (ETL) procedures are not built to work in the cloud. Non-cloud-native ETL processes increase the burden on data teams to prepare and transform the data for analysis, and that lag time prevents businesses from being truly data-driven.

Vendors recognize this challenge. A report by Grandview Research found that the global data preparation tools market was valued at $3 billion in 2020 and is expected to grow by 18.6% annually through 2028. Numerous startups have been taking market share from giants such as IBM, SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft, but they generally require clients to share confidential data with them―a non-starter for large, security-minded companies such as large banks.

An exciting exception is Matillion. Co-founded in 2011 by CEO Matthew Scullion—who worked in commercial IT and software development for 15 years at several British and European systems integrators—and CTO Ed Thompson, a former IBM software consultant, Matillion is a data integration and transformation platform built for the cloud. It extracts data from on-premises and cloud applications, transforms it, and loads it into cloud data warehouses, lakes, and lakehouses including Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, Microsoft Azure’s Synapse, and Databricks. These analytics platforms then help businesses achieve meaningful insights.

Several features distinguish Matillion from competitors:

• Matillion is a truly cloud-native ETL product, designed to take advantage of the speed and scale of the cloud to do its job.
• Its Extract Load Transform (ELT) software gives its customers control of their infrastructure, enabling them to implement and manage their own security controls as required by their corporate standards.
• Matillion’s ELT platform provides a graphical, code-optional user experience. Users can extract data by dragging an on-screen arrow from a source system to a destination and letting Matillion generate the code required to execute the data pipeline.
• Matillion’s easy-to-use interface delivers rapid return on investment to enterprises migrating from legacy vendors, by giving them the ability to launch instances within minutes and deliver new projects in the first weeks after migration.
• The platform pulls data efficiently from on-premises databases as well as various applications both in and out of the cloud, because it’s designed with over 100 pre-built source connectors as well as a Universal Connector to quickly bring in data from virtually any source.
• Customers can mine data in near-real-time rather than waiting days or weeks for new data to be prepared.
• Matillion offers consumption-based, pay-as-you-go pricing, reducing costs when lower data volumes are being extracted and migrated or transformed.

Matillion has more than 1,000 customers, including Western Union, Cisco, Slack, Subway, and Siemens. The company tripled its annual recurring revenue (ARR) from 2019 to 2021, and forecasts that it will triple its ARR again by 2023. Investors seem persuaded: Matillion has raised $310 million from General Atlantic, Lightspeed, Battery Ventures, Sapphire Ventures, and other top-tier firms.

Citi Ventures is proud to announce that we are investing in Matillion as part of its recent $150 million fundraising round. We look forward to a productive relationship with Matt, Ed, and the rest of the Matillion team.

For more information, email Vibhor Rastogi at vibhor.rastogi@citi.com or Avi Arnon at avi.arnon@citi.com.