Alteryx Inc.’s in-house legal team is in a celebratory mood after the Irvine-based data analytics software maker wrapped acquisitions of three separate cloud-based companies over the past year.
The 30-plus person legal team for Orange County’s most valuable publicly traded software company (NYSE: AYX) is focused on the company’s journey into the cloud, overseeing the purchase of Lore Io Inc., Trifacta Inc. and Hyper Anna Inc.
The deals, on a combined basis, totaled about $435 million, according to regulatory filings.
The $400 million purchase of San Francisco’s Trifacta, announced at the start of the year, was the company’s largest-ever acquisition.
“Our legal team was very involved in the negotiations, drafting of the deal documents, and completing those acquisitions,” Chief Legal Officer Christopher Lal said. “Once you’re a cloud-based software platform and hosting customer data, you are considered a data processor, and that was a cross-functional effort that our legal team led.”
Alteryx’s growth strategy includes such acquisitions, which enable the firm to expand into new market segments and enhance the products it already offers.
The technologies provided by Hyper Anna, for example, have formed the basis of Alteryx Auto-Insights, a new analytics platform with data storytelling and business insights. Trifacta’s products, meanwhile, now serve as the cloud back-end for Alteryx’s suite of cloud offerings, which also includes Alteryx Designer Cloud and Alteryx Machine Learning.
Acquisitions have “led to our ability to launch the cloud products that we have today,” according to Lal.
Fresh off these purchases, Alteryx’s legal team is now prioritizing security for customers as they work on integrating the companies.
Alteryx, which counts 8,340 customers and hundreds of thousands of users globally, won the Best In-House Legal Team Award at the Business Journal General Counsel Awards on Nov. 10 at the Irvine Marriott.
Key Communication
Alteryx’s legal team has developed a privacy and security program that includes a series of data processing agreements and data privacy impact reports to allow transparency.
“If a company has data about you, depending on the case, you have a right to ask those companies what that data is and how they’re using it. In some cases, you can also ask to have your data deleted,” Lal told the Business Journal. “So, we have put together a whole array of programs to comply with those laws and the requests and expectations of our customers.”
The team is also aiming to prevent future security challenges by creating a government affairs and public policy function to foster communication between Alteryx and policymakers.
These new departments, Lal said, will aid with negotiations with governmental agency customers, a potentially large buying group for Alteryx, and position Alteryx at the forefront of discussing security requirements.
“I think it will improve our profile and our ability to hopefully influence the conversation around those important policy initiatives and to enable the growth of our public sector sales and our customer base with the government,” Lal says.
Hiring Efforts
Alteryx’s legal team includes 29 lawyers in the U.S.—with six international lawyers added in the past three months.
Lal has overseen the onboarding of new hires and getting them up to speed with its new suite of privacy programs.
The company this month reported third-quarter revenue of $215.7 million, up 75% from the same period last year. It expects fourth-quarter revenue to be between $276 million and $281 million, representing year-over-year growth of 59% to 62%.