# Ascend.io

> Ascend.io is a Palo Alto-based data engineering platform that uses AI agents to automate the building, running, and maintenance of data pipelines across Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery and beyond. Founded in 2015 by ex-Googler and Ooyala co-founder Sean Knapp, the company replaces hand-coded ETL plumbing with a metadata-driven automation engine and DataOps Agents that can write code, fix incidents and tune performance on their own.

- **Founded:** 2015
- **Headquarters:** Palo Alto, California, United States
- **Founders:** Sean Knapp (Founder & CEO)
- **Team size:** ~21 employees
- **Products:** Ascend Data Automation Cloud, DataOps Agents, AI Pipeline Builder, Metadata Fingerprinting Engine
- **Notable:** Named 2021 Gartner Cool Vendor in Data Management, Raised $69M+ in total funding from Tiger Global, Accel, Sequoia, Lightspeed, 8VC and Shasta, Launched industry's first DataOps Agents in 2025

## Products & services

- **Ascend Data Automation Cloud** — A unified platform that combines ingestion, transformation, orchestration and observability for data pipelines across Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery and other clouds.
- **DataOps Agents** — AI agents (announced May 2025) that automate incident response, code reviews, commit messages and performance tuning inside existing data engineering workflows.
- **AI Pipeline Builder** — Natural-language interface that lets users describe a pipeline and have agents generate the code, tests and orchestration.
- **Metadata Fingerprinting Engine** — Detects schema drift and changes in upstream data, then incrementally re-runs only what is affected - the core mechanism behind self-healing pipelines.

## Achievements

- Named 2021 Gartner Cool Vendor in Data Management
- Raised $69M+ in total funding from Tiger Global, Accel, Sequoia, Lightspeed, 8VC and Shasta
- Launched industry's first DataOps Agents in 2025
- 4x user growth and 7x revenue growth in the year before Series B

## Latest updates

- **2025-05** — Launched Agentic Data Engineering and made DataOps Agents generally available.
- **2022-04** — Closed $31M Series B led by Tiger Global to extend the Data Automation Cloud to full multi-cloud data mesh.
- **2021** — Named a Gartner Cool Vendor in Data Management.

## Links

- Website: https://ascend.io
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ascend-io
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/ascend_io
- GitHub: https://github.com/ascend-io
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ascend_io
- Facebook: https://facebook.com/teamascend.io

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/ascend-io
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-06-29