Enterprise workflow management platform ServiceNow announced its second AI-related acquisition this year on Wednesday.
ServiceNow said it has signed a decisive agreement to acquire Data.World, a cloud-native data catalog and data governance platform. Based in Austin, Texas, Data.World was founded in 2015 and previously raised more than $130 million in venture finance from companies such as alumni ventures, Progis Ventures and Shasta Ventures.
The terms of the transaction have not been disclosed. Data.World was recently valued at $350 million in the company’s $50 million Series C round in 2022 per Pitchbook.
Gaurav Rewari, SVP and GM of ServiceNow’s Data Analytics, told TechCrunch that ServiceNow is looking for companies that can help its customers deploy AI at scale. Specifically, ServiceNow was trying to provide businesses with better resources to turn data into “AI-Ready.”
“As I would say, this path to agent’s ‘AI heaven’ will go through some form of data hell. That’s the harsh reality,” Rewali said.
data.world added that data.world is the right choice to help ServiceNow customers with this issue, as Data.world can organize companies and easily search for data. The addition of data.world’s data governance tool will allow customers to make the most of AI agents and other forms of AI automation, Rewari said.
“We saw a lot of companies and were very impressed with what they built,” he added. “We felt that all the journeys they existed to provide cataloging of data across a vast number of companies and governance of that data itself with regard to metadata management (and knowledge-based infrastructure) were a very important addition to our product portfolio.”
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Rewari said that once the transaction is closed, Data.World will begin to be integrated into ServiceNow, and the Data.World platform will be available as a product to ServiceNow customers in the near future.
This is the second acquisition of ServiceNow in recent months.
ServiceNow announced in March that it had agreed to develop MoveWorks, a company that develops enterprise-centric automation and AI tools, for $2.85 billion.
All of these acquisitions fit well with ServiceNow’s plans, which accepts Agent AI and the tools they need to build it. In March 2024, Philip Kirk, ServiceNow SVP of Corporate Business Development, told TechCrunch that ServiceNow will approach the transition to Agent AI by combining buildings and purchasing capabilities.
“For now, it’s like three-dimensional chess like it does now to build, buy, or figure out whether you’re a partner,” Kirk said at the time. “The biggest thing we are trying to prioritize is how we make decisions for the greatest long-term benefits of our customers, and distinguish them from what we know as enterprise automation for our platform.”
Updated 10:09 AM PT: Previous versions of this article called data.world “Declan.” ServiceNow provided TechCrunch with a blog post using the name, but the spokesman later said it was an internal product nomenclature and should not have been published. I regret the error.