Startup Coalesce Automation Inc. said today it has closed on a $26 million early-stage round of funding led by Emergence Capital, with participation from existing backers 11.2 Capital and GreatPoint Ventures.

Today’s Series A round validates the emergence of Coalesce as a promising player within the data transformation market, coming in the wake of a $5.92 million seed funding round it announced in January.

Coalesce believes it has created a technology platform that can revolutionize data transformation by rapidly accelerating the process of modeling, cleansing, governing and documenting enterprise data, so it can be analyzed more easily.

In an interview with SiliconANGLE earlier this year, Coalesce co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Armon Petrossian said data transformation is the main bottleneck in the data analytics supply chain today. That’s because the time it takes to transform data properly so it can be reliably analyzed is disproportionate to any other process in the data analytics stack, he said, blaming a lack of automation.

That’s what Coalesce is bidding to solve. The startup’s platform automates data transformation by combining an intuitive graphical user interface with the flexibility of code to enable data to be modeled, cleansed, governed and documented more rapidly. Designed for data architects, engineers and analysts, Coalesce’s platform makes it possible for them to transform data more rapidly, so it can be put to use generating insights or training artificial intelligence models.

“To make data valuable it must be transformed in the right way, and adapt to change over time,” Petrossian said in a statement. “We’re building a world-class organization to help data teams quickly model and transform data at scale.”

Thanks to Coalesce’s unique “column-aware” architecture, the platform can operate at massive scale too. It enables data teams to wrap data change management within a user-friendly UI that provides comprehensive data lineage and deployment functions.

“No other cloud tool in the data transformation space leverages column metadata from the ground up in their product architecture,” Petrossian said. “Because Coalesce does, it enables never-before-seen efficiency and governance.”

Coalesce said it has made significant progress since exiting stealth mode in January, expanding into Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and forging strategic partnerships with cloud data warehouse giant Snowflake Inc. and data integration firm Fivetran Inc.

Emergence Capital General Partner Joe Floyd said he’s backing Coalesce because the company is the first to have developed a scalable and simple way to make data usable. “When Armon and his team walked us through the product and vision, I knew his team was creating something unique,” he said. “Early customers clearly see the value in their technology and we’re excited to partner with Coalesce.”

Coalesce said the funds from today’s round will be used to build on its current momentum by investing in its product, teams and ecosystem.

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