Karya AI vs Atlan

Neither company has publicly disclosed a valuation, making a definitive size comparison difficult. Karya AI employs 10-50 people, while Atlan has 200-500 employees.

Atlan has raised more in total funding at $78M, compared to Karya AI's $3M — a gap of $75M.

Atlan holds the higher Awaira Score at 68/100, compared to Karya AI's 40/100. The Awaira Score is a composite metric factoring in valuation, funding, stage, team size, and market presence — a 28-point gap that reflects meaningful differences in scale or traction.

Karya AI was founded by Vivek Seshadri in 2021. Atlan was founded by Prukalpa Sankar in 2018. Visit each company's profile on Awaira for a full founder biography.

Karya AI: Karya is an ethical AI data collection platform that sources high-quality annotated speech, text, and image datasets from rural Indian workers through a mobile app-based microtask marketplace, paying contributors above-market wages while generating training data for Indic language AI models. The organization operates on a non-profit model with the explicit goal of redistributing AI economic value to the communities whose data enables AI development.\n\nThe company received approximately $3M in grant funding from philanthropic organizations and development-focused investors, and has enlisted workers across rural India to collect speech data, transcriptions, and annotations in dozens of Indian languages and dialects. Karya's data collection model has produced datasets in low-resource Indian languages that are otherwise commercially unavailable.\n\nKarya addresses two significant problems simultaneously — the shortage of high-quality Indic language training data and the concentration of AI economic benefits in wealthy geographies. Its model of paying fair wages to data contributors while producing strategically valuable datasets has attracted attention as a sustainable and ethical approach to building the data infrastructure that India-specific AI development requires. Atlan: Atlan is an active metadata platform and data workspace that enables data teams to discover, understand, and govern data assets across cloud warehouses, lakes, BI tools, and pipelines through an AI-powered catalog interface. The platform automatically crawls data infrastructure to build lineage graphs, enables natural language search over data assets, and enforces data governance policies through automated tagging and access controls.\n\nThe company raised approximately $78M in Series C funding from investors including Insight Partners and Sequoia India, and has built a global customer base of data-forward technology companies and enterprises. Atlan has emerged as a recognized leader in the data catalog market, competing with Alation, Collibra, and DataHub in the modern data stack ecosystem.\n\nAs cloud data infrastructure has proliferated, data discoverability and governance have become critical operational problems for engineering teams managing hundreds of data sources. Atlan's modern metadata-first approach and deep integrations with the contemporary data stack — Snowflake, dbt, Fivetran, Looker — position it well in a market where legacy catalog vendors have struggled to keep pace with infrastructure evolution.

Atlan was founded first in 2018, giving it 3 years of additional market experience. Karya AI was founded later in 2021. In AI, even a year or two of head start can translate into significantly more training data, customer relationships, and institutional knowledge.

Karya AI has approximately 10-50 employees, while Atlan has approximately 200-500. A larger team often signals higher revenue or venture backing, but in AI, smaller teams are increasingly capable of building at scale.

Yes, Karya AI and Atlan are direct competitors — both operate in the AI Data space and likely target overlapping customer segments. This comparison is especially relevant for buyers evaluating both platforms.