Matillion unifies tools, launches Data Productivity Cloud platform

Cloud data integration platform Matillion is launching its Data Productivity Cloud platform today, unifying its suite of tools in a bid to help enterprises better manage data pipelines.

The well-funded Matillion has raised $310 million to date, including a $150 million series E round announced in 2021. The company’s focus is on helping organizations build and maintain data pipelines, which is all about getting data from a source location into a target application in the right format and with high data quality. Data pipelines are used to enable business operations, data analytics, business intelligence and increasingly machine learning (ML) as well.

To date, Matillion has offered tools including a service for Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) and data connectors to help move data from source locations into data warehouses. With the Data Productivity Cloud, Matillion is integrating all of its tools to better support data operations (DataOps).

“I have yet to meet an executive at any business that says, ‘Yes, I have all the analyses, all the dashboards, all the data science use cases I need in order to make my business go as fast as possible,’” Matthew Scullion, founder and CEO of Matillion, told VentureBeat in an exclusive interview. “Part of the reason for that is that the bulk of the work is getting the data ready, in the right place, joined together, transformed, and making sure the right people can see it.”

How the Matillion Data Productivity Cloud works

Scullion said that the goal of the Data Productivity Cloud is to make data teams more productive.

The platform combines data movement, transformation and orchestration into a single user experience. Users can access the platform through code or with a visual, low-code interface. Scullion said that with the unified cloud platform, data can move from wherever it originally lives into a target cloud data warehouse where it can be analyzed and used.

For the transformation piece, Matillion is integrating with open-source dbt-core technology to help users code more sophisticated data manipulation.

“Dbt is well used across the industry, and we can provide a platform where low-code, visual developers and high-code dbt developers can work together on a single platform with both of their lives getting better because of it,” Scullion said. “We can offer things to the dbt engineer that they’re not able to do that make them more productive on the data productivity cloud platform.”

Initially, Matillion is providing support for Snowflake, with additional support coming for Databricks, Amazon Redshift and Google BigQuery.

The future of data productivity will include AI

Looking forward, Scullion noted that his firm is looking closely at AI.

In the wake of the explosive debut of ChatGPT and the generative AI revolution it has helped to spawn, Matillion, just like nearly every other IT vendor, is looking at how to integrate the technology into its business. One area where generative AI is making an impact for Matillion is helping the business to run better by analyzing and training on all of its support calls and trouble tickets, in an effort to produce better support material.

Scullion said that Matillion is also taking steps to more directly integrate AI capabilities into the company’s platform.

“Certainly during this year, we’ll be releasing our first AI-powered features that make the core job of what the Data Productivity Cloud is about — which is making data teams more productive and making their data business-ready — even better using the power of AI, and particularly generative AI,” he said.