Data management unicorn Alation Inc. has raised a $110 million funding round, announced this morning, from a group of high-profile investors led by Riverwood Capital.

Riverwood Capital was joined in the Series D round by the startup investment arms of cloud-based data warehouse maker Snowflake Inc., Dell Technologies Inc., and Salesforce.com Inc., which is also an Alation customer. A number of other institutional investors participated as well.

Alation provides a so-called data catalog that enables a company’s business analysts to access information from different systems in one place. The platform saves them time by removing the need to find the systems containing the information that they require for data projects manually. The result, according to Alation, is that analysts can start crunching data faster and thereby reduce the overall duration of projects.

“If you’re a user of data, you might have to hunt through a myriad of reports, thousands of tables in a database, hundreds of thousands of files in a data lake, and you might not know where to find your answer,” Satyen Sangani (pictured), the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Alation, explained in an April interview on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. “Just like Google has PageRank to help it inform which are the best results for a given webpage, we do the exact same thing with data.”

The resulting time savings can add significantly in a large company with multiple business analytics teams and a larger number of data sources to navigate. Alation claims that its platform facilitates a 40% productivity improvement for users in some cases. That translates into savings equivalent to millions of dollars per year for some clients, the startup says.

Besides organizing information from different systems in one place, Alation provides features to make analyzing the information easier. If a user needs assistance with navigating the data in a particular system, Alation’s platform can help them find colleagues who possess relevant expertise. A built-in SQL editor makes it possible to access and mix different kinds of data together using standard database queries.

The platform can parse disparate records from different parts of a database because it can individually connect to the applications containing the data. This connectivity, Alation says, is useful for more than just making analysts more productive.

Companies can use the platform to spot applications containing sensitive records such as payment card details that require additional privacy safeguards. Moreover, because the Alation platform functions as the central interface through which analysts interact with data in different systems, it has visibility not into the systems themselves but also into how they’re used. This usage information is useful for cloud migrations, Alation says, because it helps administrators understand how moving an on-premise system to the cloud would impact users’ access to the data inside.

The startup is experiencing strong revenue momentum. “What we’ve seen in our existing accounts is that our expansions have gone up by over 100% year-over-year,” Sangani disclosed on theCUBE.

One way the startup has sought to win market share from rival products is by making its platform easier to set up. Sangani explained that “lots of companies come to the data management world and they say, ‘We’ve got this great software, but setting the software up is a journey, it takes two to three to four years to set it up and we’re going to get an army of consultants.’ And everybody’s going to go and assert the quality of data assets and measure what the data assets do.” Alation’s platform, in contrast, can “generate that context day one, by understanding what’s going on inside of those systems.”

Alation plans to use its latest funding to continue growing sales by expanding into new markets and product areas. As part of the growth push, the startup today announced a collaboration with investor Snowflake, whose cloud data warehouse has an integration with the Alation platform. The companies plan to enhance the integration and launch “joint go-to-market initiatives,” they said today.

The new round values Alation at $1.2 billion. Overall, it has raised more than $200 million in funding to date.

Here’s a new interview with Sangani on theCUBE:

Photo: SiliconANGLE