INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Fivetran, a startup that helps companies move data from disparate repositories to data warehouses, announced $44 million Series B financing
today, less than a year after collecting a $15 million Series A round.Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) led the round with participation from
existing investors Matrix Partners and CEAS Investments
As part of the deal, Martin Casado from a16z will join the Fivetran board
Today’s investment brings the total raised to more than $59 million, according to Crunchbase.Company co-founder and CEO George Fraser said
they raised a little sooner than expected, but they needed a cash infusion to keep up with the steady growth they have been seeing
He said the company also wanted to get the funding done while the capital markets were still strong
“If we wait four months or six months, the terms are not going to be that much better — and, who knows, there could be a recession
You never know how long the sun shines, and we had interest from some really good firms that we liked, and that’s a big factor too
obviously,” he said.He added that it’s not purely an economic decision
“We’re really happy with where we landed with Martin [Casado] joining the board and Andreessen Horowitz on the cap table, but [the
economic outlook] was definitely part of our calculus.”And Casado is happy to have invested in Fivetran
Writing in a blog post today about the investment, he sees a company that’s solving a big problem in a modern context
“Fivetran is a SaaS service that connects to the critical data sources in an organization, pulls and processes all the data, and then
dumps it into a warehouse (e.g., Snowflake, BigQuery or RedShift) for SQL access and further transformations, if needed
If data is the new oil, then Fivetran is the pipes that get it from the source to the refinery,” he wrote.He said that the company already
has over 750 customers and a16z is included among them
It certainly doesn’t hurt when your lead investor uses your product.The company was founded in 2012 and has been growing steadily
Last year it had 80 employees at the time of its Series A; today it has 175
Fraser expects that to double again over the next year, and it’s all driven by business needs
He says that over the last 12 months revenue has grown 3x.With 150 connectors today, the company wants to continue to expand its array of
data connection tools and cover more data requirements
But he says the connectors are complicated and that will take an investment in more engineering talent
Today’s announcement should help in that regard.
