The AI-powered enterprise search engine that keeps your data in your own cloud - and only ever shows people what they're already allowed to see.
Atolio's teal wordmark, photographed against the company's signature navy. The mark nods to the founders' Splunk roots and their pitch: "Splunk for knowledge."
Every large organization is sitting on an answer it has already paid for. It is buried in a Slack thread from two years ago, a half-finished Confluence page, a Salesforce note, an email chain nobody archived. Atolio, a Denver-based company founded in 2019 by veterans of Splunk and PagerDuty, exists to find it - without moving a single document out of the company that owns it.
That last part is the whole idea. Most AI search tools ask an enterprise to ship its most sensitive information into a vendor's cloud, where it is indexed and queried. Atolio inverts the arrangement. Its software deploys inside the customer's own AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud environment - or on-premises with Red Hat OpenShift - and the company's queries, documents, and results never transit Atolio's infrastructure. For banks, defense agencies, and Global 2000 firms with strict data-sovereignty rules, that architecture is less a feature than a precondition for buying anything at all.
"A company's knowledge is the work product of their people, and we exist to help our clients access and leverage the knowledge they have been accruing over many years."
Atolio connects to the systems where work already lives - Office 365, Google Workspace, Slack, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and more - and builds a single search index inside the customer's environment. When it indexes a document, it also captures that document's access control list: who, which groups, and which roles are allowed to see it. Those permissions are mirrored in real time, so an employee searching Atolio only ever surfaces content they were already authorized to open. Search across everything; leak nothing.
On top of that index sits the AI layer. Atolio uses a hybrid retrieval approach - dense vector semantic search, personalized ranking, and traditional keyword matching - then applies retrieval-augmented generation to answer natural-language questions and summarize content. Crucially, the RAG layer is permission-aware too: the model can only reason over documents the asker is allowed to read. Customers bring their own large language model, whether OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS Bedrock, Google Vertex, Meta's models, or something running entirely inside their own walls.
Atolio's customers are fast-growing companies and Global 2000 enterprises operating in complex, security-sensitive environments, plus a growing roster of public-sector and defense agencies. Cengage Group, the education-technology company, is a publicly named customer and was cited on an earnings call. The company says it has validated deployments spanning tens of millions of indexed documents across dozens of source systems, returning answers in under a second, and that it won multiple seven-figure contracts across three recent quarters.
The public sector is a deliberate second front. In late 2025 the U.S. Air Force awarded Atolio a $1.25M SBIR Direct-to-Phase II contract to advance AI-powered organizational search and intelligence. In March 2026, Atolio named Carahsoft its Master Government Aggregator, making the platform available to agencies through SEWP V, ITES-SW2, NASPO ValuePoint, and OMNIA Partners contract vehicles.
The answer exists, but it is split across chat, docs, tickets, and CRM records that don't talk to each other.
Generic AI search can surface documents an employee was never meant to see. Atolio enforces source permissions in real time.
Vendor-hosted indexes mean sensitive data lives on someone else's cloud. Atolio's index stays in yours.
The person who solved this last year is invisible. Atolio's collaboration graph points you to the human expert.
Atolio is model-agnostic - bring OpenAI, Anthropic, Bedrock, Vertex, or a locally hosted LLM.
Built on the Vespa distributed search engine and validated at tens of millions of documents with sub-second latency.
Atolio competes with Glean, Coveo, Atlassian Rovo, Microsoft Copilot, and Elasticsearch. Where most rivals index your data on their infrastructure, Atolio runs entirely inside your environment. Comparison based on Atolio's publicly stated architecture.
A private search engine deployed in your AWS, Azure, GCP, or on-prem environment, indexing all connected systems with document-level permissions.
Retrieval-augmented generation that answers questions and summarizes content while respecting each user's real-time access rights. Bring your own LLM.
Surfaces the subject-matter experts behind the work based on activity patterns - find the right person, not just the right file.
Curated groupings of content that scope searches and generate focused AI summaries for a team, project, or topic.
A Platform API for white-label and custom UIs, plus Model Context Protocol support so external AI agents can securely query the permission-aware index.
Office 365, Google Workspace, Slack, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Zulip and more - unifying siloed systems into one searchable surface.
Atolio is B2B enterprise software. It sells subscription licenses for its self-hosted platform to large organizations and the public sector. Because deployment happens in the customer's own cloud, LLM token usage is billed directly to the customer by their chosen model provider - keeping both data and compute under customer control. Go-to-market runs through direct enterprise sales, partnerships such as qBotica, and public-sector distribution via Carahsoft.
Atolio plays in the enterprise AI search and knowledge-management market, a category energized by generative AI. Its wedge is the segment competitors serve least well: regulated, security-sensitive, and sovereignty-conscious organizations that cannot let an index leave their walls. That focus is what drew IBM Ventures, whose Global Head of Venture Capital called Atolio's work "a critical challenge that enterprises are facing today."
Two decades in engineering and sales at Splunk, PagerDuty, and Loggly. Sets Atolio's vision and leads the company.
Product and engineering leadership from SourceForge, Anki, and Splunk. Drives the product and technical roadmap.
Co-built PagerDuty's sales team with Lanstein and grew it to IPO. Leads Atolio's commercial engine.
Atolio has been remote-native since inception, with roughly 39 people spread across Denver, San Francisco, Toronto, Vancouver, Halifax, and Nashville. The team deliberately works the same distributed, tool-heavy way its customers do - which is, not coincidentally, exactly the environment that produces the knowledge-sprawl Atolio was built to tame.
"Enterprise search is a key application where businesses can harness the power of generative AI, but protecting sensitive data remains a top priority."
"IBM's investment in Atolio underscores our commitment to solving a critical challenge that enterprises are facing today: unlocking and connecting knowledge across complex, siloed organizations."
David Lanstein, Gareth Watts, and Mark Matta start Atolio, aiming to build "Splunk for knowledge" after interviewing 700+ enterprises.
Atolio ships permission-aware RAG, hybrid search, and the collaboration graph for enterprise deployments.
Reaches $24M in total funding led by Translink Capital and wins a $1.25M U.S. Air Force SBIR Direct-to-Phase II contract.
Partners with Carahsoft for government distribution and qBotica for AI-agent automation, and integrates with Zulip.
Series A closed September 8, 2025, bringing total funding to $24M.
Video availability may change; links point to Atolio's official product page and public search results.
atolio.com · atolio.com/about-atolio · atolio.com/product · atolio.com/security · businesswire.com (Series A, Sep 2025) · crunchbase.com/organization/atolio · cbinsights.com/company/atolio · theorg.com/org/atolio · carahsoft.com · globenewswire.com · prnewswire.com (qBotica) · blog.zulip.com · aimmediahouse.com · atolio.com/glean-vs-atolio