Enterprise data intelligence platform Alation acquires digital sites to help its customers access AI agents running on top of their structured data.

The terms of the transaction are not disclosed. Digital Station builds AI-native data apps, a Series A startup that raises more than $17 million in venture capital from companies including Norwest Venture Partners, Madrona and Factory.

Alation Alation Co-founder and CEO Satyen Sangani told TechCrunch that Alation plans to integrate digital station products into its own products as soon as the quarter ends.

“One thing that gave us great confidence is that[the company]has structured it in a fundamentally complementary way that we can complete the integration quickly,” he said.

Sangani said that data and knowledge consumption are increasingly happening through large language models, but the fact that LLM is prone to hallucination means that companies have not yet meaningfully adopted AI data tools. Sangani said his company's next data management phase must include a translation layer located between LLM and enterprise data.

Sangani said digital stations are a natural choice to provide that layer because it has built AI agents used on structured data. The fact that Alation's former co-founder Venky Ganti has been working on the digital station for several years was not hurt.

"Essentially giving LLM's capabilities the ability to talk to the core databases of enterprise fuels and operating enterprises, we think it's basically a solution to the scale of LLMS in-house," Sangani said.

Sangani said last year, Alation began building its own AI agents, including one of data quality, and documents the company hopes to release this quarter. However, acquiring companies like Digital Stations allows Alation to provide workflow automation faster.

“What we bring is all the metadata and all the background around the data and this huge, rough connector library and all this enterprise knowledge,” Sangani said. “What they bring to them is the ability to bring these LLMs and take their cutting-edge technology and operate on that data.”

Founded in 2012, Alation currently works with more than 600 corporate clients including Nasdaq, Hertz and Samsung. The company has raised over $300 million in venture capital from companies such as General Catalyst, Andreessen Horowitz and Sapphire Ventures. The company was last estimated at $1.7 billion in 2022.