Prukalpa Sankar

Atlan and the context layer

Prukalpa Sankar is co-founder and co-CEO of Atlan, alongside Varun Banka. Atlan describes itself as the context layer for AI, a platform that helps organizations organize their data so that AI systems can understand and use it. The company's site says Sankar opens and closes its Context Conference, scheduled for October 28, 2026 as an online event.^[1][2]

Childhood, education and early jobs

Sankar grew up in India, where her mother ran an education nonprofit that she started from home. NTU's alumni profile says that at 15 Sankar wrote a letter to herself naming entrepreneurs she admired and stating a goal of building something that improved people's lives. She studied chemical and biomolecular engineering at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and took its Minor in Entrepreneurship. Unreasonable Group's profile adds that she had brief stints at Goldman Sachs and Exxon Mobil before founding her first company.^[2][4]

SocialCops

At NTU she met Banka on a bus into town. Their first idea, a mobile payments app, failed; they then funded their first year largely with prize money from international business plan competitions, and NTU recounts that a 4 a.m. crowdfunding campaign after an overnight build drew a $100 contribution from a stranger. They went on to found SocialCops, a data intelligence company that NTU says supported development projects in more than 50 countries with partners including the Government of India, UNICEF and the United Nations.^[2]

Unreasonable Group's profile says Sankar spent five years in India driving data science projects, including the National Data Platform for India and a Sustainable Development Goals tracker for the United Nations that was implemented in three countries. Her speaker profile at Dremio adds the World Bank and the Gates Foundation to the list of organizations her teams worked with.^[4][3]

Building Atlan

Atlan grew out of an internal tool Sankar and Banka built to fix their own data problems at SocialCops. Atlan says it launched publicly in 2020 as a context layer for data. In 2023 it introduced Atlan AI, built with Microsoft Azure and OpenAI, which generates descriptions and documentation for data assets from SQL logic; the company says customers generated 290,000 descriptions in a year with a 90 percent acceptance rate. In 2024 it introduced the Context Lakehouse, described as Iceberg-native and built for AI agents.^[1][2]

Also in 2024, Atlan raised a $105 million Series C led by GIC and Meritech Capital, bringing total funding above $200 million. The company says revenue grew seven times over two years, enterprise sales grew 400 percent in the first quarter of 2024 and it won 75 percent of competitive deals. NTU's profile lists Mastercard, JPMorgan and Zoom among its clients, and Atlan's own page names Workday and Fox as customers.^[1][2]

Analyst recognition and 2026 milestones

Atlan reports that in 2025 it was named a Leader in two Gartner Magic Quadrants (metadata management, and data and analytics governance), a two-time Leader in Forrester Wave reports for enterprise data catalogs and data governance, and a G2 Leader for six consecutive quarters. It held Re:Govern, which it called the first conference on context, with attendees from Mastercard, Nasdaq and General Motors among others.^[1]

For 2026 the company cites 8 billion reads on the Context Lakehouse in 90 days and Context Agents that have generated 1.03 million descriptions at what it calls 87 percent human-parity quality, saving more than 110,000 hours across 50-plus enterprises. These are company-reported figures. It also launched Frontier Labs, described as an open lab for AI-native company building.^[1]

Views on AI and public speaking

Sankar has argued that people lose jobs to other people who use AI better, not to AI itself, and that recent graduates are well placed to lead the shift. She speaks at events such as HumanX in San Francisco and was scheduled to speak at the NTU Tech Summit and Alumni Conference in Silicon Valley on October 23, 2026. NTU notes she still replies to students who reach out.^[2]

Recognition

Her Dremio profile lists her as a New York Times Global Visionary and Economic Times Emerging Entrepreneur of the Year, and notes inclusion in Forbes 30 Under 30, Fortune 40 Under 40 and CNBC's Top 10 Young Business Women (2016). Unreasonable Group lists her as part of Unreasonable FUTURE 2019 and as an Unreasonable Fellow.^[3][4]

Why she matters

Sankar moved from using data for public-sector development work to building the tooling that enterprises use to govern it, and Atlan now frames that tooling as the context AI agents need to work reliably. Her bet that data catalogs become the foundation for trustworthy AI puts Atlan at the center of one of the main enterprise-software debates of the moment.^[1][2]

On The Executive List

Prukalpa Sankar is ranked No. 88 on The Executive List (October 2026) in the Chief Data Officers discipline. The ranking reflects The Executive Review's own editorial Trending Score; it is not an outside award, and placement on the list is never sold. View the October 2026 edition.