Prukalpa
Sankar

When Prukalpa and Varun launched SocialCops, they had no money. They filed a Kickstarter campaign and raised $600. Then they entered every business plan competition they could find worldwide, eventually collecting $25,000-$30,000 in prize money. This wasn't humility - it was resourcefulness under constraint, a muscle that would define how both SocialCops and Atlan were built.

SocialCops started as a civic tech experiment - what if you could crowdsource data about broken infrastructure and redirect city budgets toward real problems? The idea evolved quickly. The United Nations came calling. The Indian government wanted a national data platform. The Gates Foundation wanted SDG tracking. An 8-person team - four of whom had never deployed production code - built India's National Data Platform in 12 months. The World Economic Forum called them a Tech Pioneer. The New York Times named them a Global Visionary.

The insight that changed everything came buried in operational chaos. When SocialCops analyzed data at the scale of half a billion people, something broke - and nobody knew what. Eight hours. Four senior people. One wrong dashboard number. When they finally traced the problem, Prukalpa understood that no amount of better databases or faster pipelines would fix the underlying issue: data teams didn't have a shared language, shared context, or shared source of truth. They were technically sophisticated and organizationally blind.

The internal tool they built to fix this - something like a "GitHub for data" - made their team six times more agile. When they showed it to other data teams, everyone wanted it. That's how Atlan was born: not from a market gap analysis, but from a genuine internal pain point, validated by talking to 150+ data scientists before writing a line of product code.

Prukalpa's theory of data governance is deliberately contrarian. Most organizations treat governance as a defense mechanism - a compliance layer, a set of restrictions, a necessary bureaucracy. She argues it should be an offensive strategy: the thing that makes data teams faster, not slower. Rebranding governance as "data enablement" is not marketing spin. It's a structural reframing that changes what gets built and how teams adopt it.

The numbers back her up. Atlan wins 75% of competitive trials. Revenue grew 7x in two years. Enterprise sales grew 400% in Q1 2024. The Series C, led by GIC (Singapore's sovereign wealth fund) and Meritech Capital, raised $105M and pushed the company's valuation to $750M - bringing total funding past $206M from investors including Insight Partners, Sequoia, Salesforce Ventures, and the founding teams of Snowflake, Looker, and Datadog.

Company building at Atlan runs on a framework that Prukalpa describes as "customer greater than company, greater than team, greater than me." Culture is tested with a "Mars exercise" - which values would you keep if you had to start a completely different company on another planet? The hiring process has no resume screening. There are "challenge statements" - real problems that show how candidates actually think. High performers who don't share values get asked to leave.

She also invented a "founder track" for early employees who thrive on zero-to-one building but don't want to become operators at scale. It's a retention strategy that treats people like SaaS products - attract them, help them grow exponentially, maintain the relationship when they leave, and build a referral flywheel. It's a model she borrowed from McKinsey and repackaged for the startup world.