Article

Airbyte Raises a $150M Series-B to Power the Movement of Data

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December 20, 2021

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5 min read

Summarize this article with:

TL;DR: We just raised $150m at a $1.5b valuation. The round was led by new investor Altimeter Capital and Coatue Management, alongside Thrive Capital, Salesforce Ventures, Benchmark, Accel, and SV Angel.

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Last year, the Airbyte team, John, and I set out to address the ever-growing problem of data integration and to finally offer a community-powered solution that would solve the problem for all companies.

Altimeter Capital and Coatue Management, along with Thrive Capital, Salesforce Ventures, Benchmark, Accel, and SV Angel, joined us in our journey, leading a $150 million funding in Series B ($1.5B valuation).

Looking back, it feels like 2021 has been the longest year in my life. So much has happened. With the team we like to say that we are running in front of a high-speed train. And this train is our community, our users and our customers.

Everything we’ve done has been powered by you, our community – from the early adopters of Airbyte when we had only 3 (barely working) data sources, to every single person who joins our Slack every day to give us feedback, help the other community members and contribute to make Airbyte a better platform. For that, the whole team wants to express how grateful we are!

As founders and as a company, it is important to not see this funding as a milestone but as fuel. Fuel that allows us to continue to delight our community, to continue to grow our team (we just launched our referral program 🙂) and to make our Open Source and Cloud the standard for every single company that needs to move data.

This funding also brings us closer to our goal: to power all companies’ movement of data.

The world of data is being “transformed” (no pun intended)

We live in a defining time when it comes to data. Every organization in the world is rethinking how they are approaching data. This new world is centered around three pillars: data movement (with ETL/ELT), data warehouses, and transformation.

With Airbyte, we focus on the first pillar. There are a few other actors on the market, but none of them will be able to tackle the long tail of integrations. Only Open Source and a vibrant community can address the breadth of places where companies have fragmented data assets.

The ease of access to data that Airbyte offers acts as an accelerator for the next generation of companies’ data infrastructure. It allows every warehouse buyer to be up and running within a matter of minutes, with the data that they need, where they need it. And with the GA launch of Airbyte just around the corner, the power of what we are building with Open Source will become available to every single data practitioner.

Our North Star

We have very ambitious goals for the year to come, and we will focus all our energy on our North Star: to provide the most reliable and ubiquitous platform for moving data.

When addressing ubiquity, first, we will continue to focus on connectivity. This includes providing the best database replication and connector quality, enabling our community to address the long tail of connectors, and with pricing that scales with our users’ continuously increasing volume of data. As we are making progress on the long tail, we will officially launch the participative model that will allow us to do revenue optimization from our connectors with our contributors.

Second, we will focus on location. We will facilitate access to data that has been heretofore inaccessible or that lives in regulated regions. This will be solved by making Airbyte able to run on any cloud, region or infrastructure. We’ve already gained a lot of experience in this particular domain with all the existing deployments of Airbyte, and we are going to streamline it within Cloud.

Third, we will focus on new types of data movement. This will include streaming data ingestion and reverse-ETL.

In parallel, we will invest heavily in reliability. Reliability is key when building data infrastructure, since every business process is built on top of it. It doesn’t mean that it will never fail, but it will be resilient and will offer visibility on failures. We will provide better ways to diagnose and test, and better tooling for our community and our team to build the highest quality connectors.

To achieve these goals we will need to accelerate our growth, and this new funding will fuel it.

Growing our team and our community

To move toward this milestone, we will double down on growing the team and our community.

We are recruiting people from everywhere in the world across all functions (Product, Engineering, Sales, Marketing, Recruiting, People...). We will recruit fast–from 30 team members today to 200 by the end of 2022–but we will recruit in line with our values. Values allow companies to be opinionated about who they bring in to build a functioning organization. At Airbyte, we committed to these values early on and have stayed true to them. For us, it is about making sure we continue to build a safe, diverse, challenging and motivating environment.

We are also going to grow the team to support our community. We will invest in better user success, better developer experience through better documentation, and better enablement through a lot more content in all formats, including meetups and conferences (when COVID allows).

By the way, if this resonates with you or if you know people who would thrive here, check out our Careers page! We’re also launching today our open employee referral program, so don’t hesitate to refer people you’ve worked with and get $5,000 of referral reward if we hire them!

Final words

As I mentioned at the beginning, this accomplishment wouldn’t have been possible without our team, our community, our families and our friends.

John and I will host a live video call on Tuesday 01/11 at 11am PT, where we will show the community how we pitched Airbyte for the Series-B and reply to any questions the community might have. Sign up on that session here!

John and I would like to thank all of you again for your continuous support! Together, let's continue to make data better and to make our community be the new force that powers the new data world.

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