The spreadsheet-centric database and code-free platform Airtable announced today that it has raised a $ 185 million Series D funding round, leading the company to a post-money valuation of $ 2.585 billion.
Thrive Capital led the round, with additional funding from existing investors Benchmark, Coatue, Caffeinated Capital and CRV, as well as new investor D1 Capital. With this, Airtable, which claims it now has 200,000 businesses using its service, has raised a total of around $ 350 million. Current clients include Netflix, HBO, Condé Nast Entertainment, TIME, City of Los Angeles, MIT Media Lab, and IBM.
Additionally, the company is also rolling out one of its biggest feature updates today, starting to run on the company's overall platform vision that goes beyond its current code-less functionality and brings more low-code functionality, as well as a new automation (think IFTTT for Airtable) and data management tools at the service.
As founder and CEO of Airtable Howie Liu he told me, a number of investors have approached the company since it increased its Series C round in 2018, partly because the market has clearly understood the potential size of the low-code / no-code market.
"I think there is this growing recognition from the market that the space is real and that the spaces are very large [...], "he told me." While we didn't strictly need the funding, it allowed us to continue to invest aggressively to aggressively promote our platform, vision and execution, " [...] without having to worry about "well, what's up with COVID?" There is a lot of uncertainty, right? And I think even today there is still a lot of uncertainty about what the next year will bring. "
The company began opening the round a couple of months after the first tidy retreat in California and for most investors it was a purely digital process.
Liu has always been open about wanting to build this company for the long term, especially after selling his latest company to Salesforce. at an early stage. As a founder, that probably means he's trying to keep his stake in the company high, even as Airtable continues to raise more money. He argues, however, that more than just legal and structural controls, being aligned with his investors is what matters most.
"I think actually, what's most important in my view, is having a philosophical alignment and an alignment of expectations with investors," he said. "Because I don't want to be in a position where it's a legal right or a structural debate about the future of the company. It seems to me almost the last resort where you have already come to a place where things are bad. I would much prefer to be in a position where all the investors around the table, whether they have a say or not, are fully aligned with what we are trying to do with this business. "
Just as important as the new funding, however, are the various new features the company launches today. Perhaps the most important of these is Airtable Apps. Previously, Airtable users could use building blocks to add maps, Gantt charts, and other features to their tables. But while being a code-free service it definitely helped Airtable users get started, there's always an inevitable point where default functionality isn't enough and users need more customized tools (Liu calls it an escape valve) . So with Airtable apps, more sophisticated users can now create additional functionality in JavaScript, and if they choose to do so, they can share these new features with other users in the new Airtable Marketplace.
"You may or may not need a relief valve and, of course, we've gotten to this point with 200,000 organizations using Airtable without that type of relief valve," he noted. "But I think we open a lot more use cases when you can say, well, Airtable itself is 99% there, but that last 1% is good or bad. You need it. And then, just have that grip and leveraging much more to build that use case on Airtable with 1% effort, rather than building the full-stack application as a custom application is the difference. "
The other important news is Airtable Automations. This way, you can create customized and automated workflows to generate reports or perform other repetitive steps. You can do much of this via the service's GUI or use JavaScript to create your own custom flows and integrations. For now, this feature is available for free, but the team is looking into how to charge for it over time, as these automated flows can get expensive if they run often.
The latest new feature is Airtable Sync. This way, teams can more easily share data across an organization, while also providing controls for who can see what. "The goal is to allow the people who created software with Airtable to make that software interconnected and to be able to share a truth table source between different instances of our tables," Liu explained.