Peloton’s former CFO has a new role at Alation

“It was immediate. It was the first time I actually felt like my life and my work were kind of in harmony with one another.” That’s what Jill Woodworth tells me about becoming a CFO and knowing it was her calling. 

Woodworth’s first role as a finance chief was at the exercise equipment company Peloton Interactive. But in April, she joined the data-driven startup Alation, and the company made the announcement on May 11. In addition to finance, Woodworth is also in charge of IT and legal functions. 

“I just want to meet everyone,” she says of her plans for the first few months. “I want to understand what we’re doing well and where there are opportunities to improve.” Woodworth was drawn to the company by its people and a “unique opportunity to learn a new business model and enterprise software.” 

Alation, founded in 2012, completed a $123 million Series E funding round in late 2022, which brought total funding raised to $340 million to date. The up-round elevated the company’s current valuation to more than $1.7 billion. The company is focusing on growing the business and not pursuing an IPO at this time, Woodworth says. In essence, Alation’s software can crawl an organization’s databases in order to build data search catalogs, and automatically index the data by source. It uses machine learning to continually improve human understanding. 

Woodworth compares how the platform works to Yelp, where you can conduct a simple search for a particular restaurant location, read reviews, and see what restaurants are the most popular. “Alation is a platform that allows you to see from a crowd-sourced perspective what data and what queries are being used by the organization,” she explains. “You are able to select from data that’s widely trusted and used by the organization, and you can see that visualization in the tool. Just like Yelp. Kind of like a Google platform.

Companies that use Alation include Pfizer, Salesforce, Robinhood, and Aon. “We’re already servicing over 450 customers across the world—Latin America, APAC, EMEA—and we service 35% of the Fortune 100,” Woodworth says.

Three lessons 

Prior to joining Peloton in 2018, Woodworth worked in investment banking at Morgan Stanley and as a managing director at J.P. Morgan. She built a global finance team at Peloton to support the company’s growth and led their IPO and several other…