Alation Acquires Numbers Station to Unlock a New Era of Agentic Workflows

REDWOOD CITY, California — May 20, 2025 — Alation Inc., the leader in enterprise data intelligence, today announced that it has acquired Numbers Station AI, a pioneer in building AI agents for data workflows. The combined capabilities of Alation and Numbers Station will accelerate the ability of data and engineering teams to quickly build and deploy a new class of AI-native analytics applications featuring agentic workflows that operate with enterprise-grade governance and context. 

Organizations are demanding more effective ways to leverage their data for insights and real-time decisions, particularly in the era of AI. Despite its promise, scaled adoption in production use cases continues to be a challenge. For organizations to achieve what is truly possible with AI, they need systems that are trustworthy and deeply integrated with diverse enterprise data ecosystems. 

Structured data—such as customer records, supply chain records, and financial transactions—represents an organization’s most critical assets. AI agents struggle to understand and take action on that data due to incomplete semantics and data definitions, unclear governance policies, and missing context of the lineage and data quality of the underlying data sets. Without this foundation, agents risk producing inaccurate outputs and violating privacy and compliance requirements.

Together, Alation and Numbers Station are uniquely positioned to close this gap. By combining Numbers Station’s agents with Alation’s rich metadata foundation, customers will be able to build intelligent applications that reason over structured data, understand business context, and automate real-time decision-making—all while maintaining rigorous governance and compliance standards. This will unlock a new era of agentic workflows that can deliver tangible business outcomes at enterprise scale.

“Numbers Station has proven the impact AI agents can have in the enterprise when companies are able to trust this new way of working and brings an exceptional team that shares our obsession with empowering data users,” said Satyen Sangani, Co-Founder and CEO of Alation. “Together, we’re laying the foundation for the next decade of enterprise data intelligence—one where humans and agents collaborate seamlessly to turn data into action.”

“From the start, our vision has been to enable anyone to be a data app builder,” said Chris Aberger, Co-Founder and CEO of Numbers Station. “By joining forces with Alation, we’re pairing our AI-native foundation with the most trusted enterprise data intelligence platform. This unlocks a future where agents don’t just find data—they do more with it.”

Numbers Station, AI & Solving The Structured Data Problem for Businesses

Founded out of Stanford’s PhD lab for machine learning and AI, the Numbers Station team authored the first academic paper to demonstrate how large language models could be deployed to meet the complex, domain-specific needs of enterprise data leaders. Numbers Station’s agents bring automation and natural language interaction to tasks like data analysis, visualization, and end-to-end action—helping data teams build AI-native applications faster with more confidence.

As part of the acquisition, the Numbers Station team will join Alation to drive continued innovation at the intersection of AI and data. All existing Numbers Station customers will be fully supported and will benefit from expanded resources and roadmap continuity under Alation’s platform.

To learn more about the acquisition, read the blog, “Alation Acquires Numbers Station: Enabling AI to Understand Structured Data at Scale.”