Retool’s Series C2 fundraise

David Hsu
David Hsu
Founder and CEO @ Retool

Jul 27, 2022

We’re excited to share that we’ve raised $45M at a $3.2B valuation.

Our Series C2 is a continuation of our unconventional approach to fundraising—instead of raising the maximum amount at the highest valuation, we raise small rounds at lower valuations, which minimizes dilution and preserves upside for employees. Our fundraising strategy is optimized for our team, not for vanity metrics. (We think those vanity metrics are distracting; we prefer to focus on our core work: shipping great products and delivering value to customers.)

In this round, we’ve partnered (again) with investors that believe in our approach. This round was financed by previous investors, including Sequoia, Daniel Gross, Elad Gil, John and Patrick Collison, and Nat Friedman. They’ve invested in all our previous rounds, and we’re delighted they’re quintupling down with us.

For those who haven't tried Retool yet, we're a new way of building software, specifically internal-facing software. Today, teams of all sizes use Retool, ranging from fast-growing startups (Brex, Checkout.com, CRED, etc.) to large enterprises. The range of use cases we’ve seen customers build atop Retool is astounding: NBC, for example, schedules the Olympics via Retool, Snowflake saves thousands of hours a month of manual work with their Retool apps, and Amazon handles GDPR exports through Retool. Software is eating the world, but the world of internal software is often neglected; we’re excited these companies are turbocharging their internal operations with quality internal software, built in Retool.

We think Retool is just enough code—you assemble the UI for your app in minutes via a drag-and-drop interface, but then use code to specify your custom business logic quickly. And Retool is always improving behind the scenes: over the past few months, we’ve launched the most comprehensive component library for internal apps (so you don’t have to worry about things like which React table library is virtualized, but also has built-in sorting, filtering, and search), launched Source Control to let you version your Retool apps with Git (so you get the benefits of source code control, but also the benefits of a visual programming language), and shipped hundreds of other improvements. Our teams are fully focused on how we can (in the background) improve your internal tools so that you can focus on your customer and product experience.

One last thing: today, we’re also launching a new free plan, targeted towards developers. Retool is now free to use for up to 5 people. Through our customers, we’ve seen how great internal tools can be transformative for businesses. Unfortunately, companies rarely have the resources to invest in truly excellent tooling for their teams. We believe money shouldn’t be a barrier to stellar operations: with our new free plan, we wanted to remove that barrier. I’d encourage you to watch the demo video and try it out. (And if you have any feedback or feature requests, please let me know; we love hearing feedback.)

What we’ve built so far only reflects a tiny fraction of our ambition for the decades to come; if you’re excited by the mission to change the way that software is built, we’re actively hiring across all teams in San Francisco, New York, Seattle, and London—please do reach out!

Read external coverage in TechCrunch's article.

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David Hsu
David Hsu
Founder and CEO @ Retool
Jul 27, 2022
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