Announcing Acryl Data

I am delighted to announce the public launch of Acryl Data! I started Acryl Data with my illustrious co-founder Shirshanka Das. Acryl Data’s vision is to bring clarity to data through our next generation metadata platform which is based on the popular open-source project LinkedIn DataHub. Acryl Data is driving the open-source DataHub project in close collaboration with LinkedIn.

I spent the last six years at Airbnb during the hyper growth phase of the company leading up to the recent successful IPO. During this time, I had the privilege of leading the data platform team and managing exceptional engineers who built foundational tools like Apache Airflow, Apache Superset, Minerva, Airbnb Dataportal, ML infrastructure and many other tools. The data engineers, data scientists and ML engineers greatly benefited from all the specialized tools we built and open sourced but due to the fragmented nature of the stack, we ended up with problems of wasted effort in finding the right data and huge problems of data quality as data traveled through all these tools. These problems are pervasive across the industry and lead to wasted productivity and data products that cannot be trusted.

At Airbnb, we reached the conclusion that the key to creating a coherent understanding of data across this fragmented ecosystem lies in having a free flowing and uniformly accessible metadata fabric. My co-founder Shirshanka reached a similar conclusion during his journey at LinkedIn and has done ground-breaking work in this area, founding the open-source DataHub project. DataHub’s architecture is fundamentally differentiated from other systems in this space with its stream-first approach, flexible metadata modeling and the ability to trigger actions based on changes in metadata in a streaming fashion.

At Acryl Data, we will continue to innovate on the open-source DataHub project and make it the world's best metadata platform. Using this platform, we will power the most reliable enterprise data search and discovery application. We will also enable customers to implement automated actions which are triggered in response to changing metadata to enable continuous data quality. 

We are fortunate to have incredible advisors. Jeff Weiner, who scaled LinkedIn to great heights and whose compassionate leadership has inspired me constantly throughout my career, Joe Hellerstein who is a powerhouse in the field of data and has produced groundbreaking metadata research, Kumar Ramachandran, a successful entrepreneur himself, will help us navigate the company building process.

We are backed by a stellar group of investors: 8VC is our lead investor and our partner Bhaskar Ghosh, a long time mentor, has a deep background in this space and immediately understood our ambitious vision. LinkedIn has a rich history of creating great companies based on projects started there and we are proud to have them as investors. George Mathew at Insight Partners really understands that a fresh take is needed for a metadata platform for the modern data stack, Jeremy Schneider and the team at Webb Investment Network are legendary for their founder friendly approach, Jeff Weiner and Brian Rumao at Next Play Ventures with their hands-on approach to company building will help us tremendously and Pete Soderling at Data Community Fund has deep understanding of the data ecosystem and we share the same community oriented approach to company building.

I’m excited to partner with Shirshanka and our stellar founding team in building Acryl Data. Our vision is to bring clarity to data through our next generation metadata platform. Come join the movement!