Big-data company Alation Inc. has just landed a hefty $50 million later-stage round of funding as it looks to help more enterprises access corporate information buried deep within their computer systems.

Sapphire Ventures is the main investor in the Series C round announced today, which also saw the participation of existing investors Costanoa Venture Capital, Data Collective Venture Capital, Harmony Partners and Icon Ventures. Those backers are all betting on the growth of Alation’s data catalog service, which acts as a kind of hub for company employees to find and query corporate data no matter where it resides.

Data catalogs such as Alation are helping drive a self-service model for analytics, allowing users to access data on demand without going through a middleman. Alation works by collecting data from different systems and applying machine learning algorithms in order to map out where it’s stored, sparing workers the hassle of searching for specific details themselves and potentially making them more productive.

Information scattered across different systems is also grouped in the process to assemble a complete picture of important subjects such as customers and revenue. Alation then takes that concept further, layering business intelligence features directly over its core cataloging technology to help put the data to use.

The platform provides a native development environment for creating queries that are automatically logged and analyzed for patterns that can help improve collaboration across an organization. Once enough information has been gathered, Alation starts pointing out the most important data objects to new employees and translates natural-language input into regular requests.

Given sufficient time, Alation’s machine learning engine, called Behavior I/O, can even put together a profile of each individual user based on his or her areas of focus. That allows workers to quickly find the person that’s most qualified to provide clarification on a particular snippet of information or issue. The resulting interactions are then recorded for future reference to complement the wiki and forum applications also included the package.

These features help users ensure they can trust the data they’re using to make key business decisions, Alation co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Satyen Sangani told SiliconANGLE in an interview. He explained that users often can’t understand or contextualize data even when they can find the information they are looking for. They also don’t know how the information was produced, how recently it was generated, or the context or assumptions behind the analysis of the data they’re using, he added.

“Alation provide data consumers with the appropriate context to know whether insights or analytics can be trusted to make a decision, effectively closing the gap between analytics and action,” Sangani said.

In the last year, Alation updated its data catalog with a new governance feature called TrustCheck that ensures data doesn’t violate any compliance regulations. Aaron Kalb, Alation’s vice president of design and strategic initiatives, appeared on SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio theCUBE last July to discuss the implications of the TrustCheck feature:

The company also partnered with Salesforce.com Inc. and Tableau Software Inc. to enable TrustCheck on those platforms.

Alation said it will use some of its new funds to add new features to its data catalog platform. The company has also vowed to push more resources into its research and development efforts in order to develop more machine learning features.

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