ServiceNow Acquires Data.World After Recently Acquiring Moveworks

On Wednesday, the enterprise workflow management platform ServiceNow revealed its second AI-focused acquisition of the year.

ServiceNow has finalized an agreement to acquire Data.World, a cloud-native data catalog and governance platform. Established in 2015 and headquartered in Austin, Texas, Data.World has raised over $130 million in venture funding from investors such as Alumni Ventures, Prologis Ventures, and Shasta Ventures, according to Crunchbase.

The specifics of the deal remain undisclosed. Data.World’s latest valuation was $350 million after its $50 million Series C funding round in 2022, per PitchBook.

Gaurav Rewari, SVP and GM of data analytics at ServiceNow, explained to TechCrunch that they are pursuing collaborations to help clients deploy AI at scale, focusing on providing businesses with improved tools to make their data “AI-ready.”

“As I often say, this journey to agentic ‘AI heaven’ traverses a certain kind of data hell, and that’s a tough reality,” remarked Rewari.

He stressed that Data.World is well-suited for assisting ServiceNow clients in overcoming this obstacle, as it helps organizations structure and effectively search their data. With the integration of Data.World’s governance features, customers will be better equipped to maximize the effectiveness of their AI agents and various AI automation methods, noted Rewari.

“We reviewed multiple companies and were thoroughly impressed by their achievements,” he said. “Their comprehensive approach to metadata management and knowledge-based infrastructure for cataloging data across large enterprises, along with its governance, is a significant enhancement to our product suite.”

Rewari mentioned that once the acquisition is complete, Data.World will begin integrating into ServiceNow, with its platform anticipated to be available as a product to ServiceNow clients shortly thereafter.

This represents ServiceNow’s second recent acquisition.

In March, ServiceNow disclosed its agreement to acquire Moveworks, a company focused on enterprise automation and AI tools, for $2.85 billion.

These acquisitions are well aligned with ServiceNow’s strategy to embrace agentic AI alongside the essential tools for its development. In March 2024, Philip Kirk, SVP of corporate business development at ServiceNow, informed TechCrunch that the company plans to navigate the transition to agentic AI through a mix of building and acquiring capabilities.

“It’s a complex decision-making process right now, whether to build, buy, or partner,” Kirk noted during that time. “Our top priority is to make choices that best serve our customers in the long run and to highlight our strengths in enterprise automation on our platform.”

Updated 10:09 a.m. Pacific: An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to Data.World as “Declan.” ServiceNow provided TechCrunch with a blog post that included this name, which a spokesperson later indicated is internal product terminology and should not have been made public. We apologize for the error.