Fivetran announces $15M Series A to build automated data pipelines

Fivetran, a startup that builds automated data pipelines between data repositories and cloud data warehouses and analytics tools, announced a $15 million Series A investment led by Matrix Partners.

Fivetran helps move data from source repositories like Salesforce and NetSuite to data warehouses like Snowflake or analytics tools like Looker. Company CEO and co-founder George Frasier says that the automation is the key differentiator here between his company and competitors like Informatica and SnapLogic.

“What makes Fivetran different is that it's an automated data pipeline to basically connect all your sources. You can access your data warehouse, and all of the data just appears and gets kept updated automatically,” Frasier explained. While he acknowledges that there is a great deal of complexity behind the scenes to drive that automation, he stresses that his company is hiding that complexity from the customer.

The company launched out Y Combinator in 2012, and other than $4 million in seed funding along the way, it has relied solely on revenue up until now. That's a rather refreshing approach to running an enterprise startup, which typically requires piles of cash to build out sales and marketing organizations to compete with the big guys they are trying to unseat.

One of the key reasons that they've been able to take this approach has been the company's partner strategy. Having the ability to get data into another company's solution with a minimum of fuss and expense has attracted data-hungry applications. In addition to the previously mentioned Snowflake and Looker, the company counts Google BigQuery, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Redshift, Tableau, Periscope Data, Salesforce, NetSuite and PostgreSQL as partners.

Ilya Sukhar, general partner at Matrix Partners, who will be joining the Fivetran board under the terms of deal sees a lot of potential here. “We've gone from companies talking about the move to the cloud to preparing to execute their plans, and the most sophisticated are making Fivetran, along with cloud data warehouses and modern analysis tools, the backbone of their analytical infrastructure,” Sukhar said in a statement.

They currently have 100 employees spread out across four offices in Oakland, Denver, Bangalore and Dublin. They boast 500 customers using their product including Square, WeWork, Vice Media and Lime Scooters, among others.