UPDATED 09:00 EDT / JUNE 30 2020

BIG DATA

Fivetran becomes the latest tech unicorn after raising $100M in Series C funding

Data integration company Fivetran Inc. said today it has become the latest tech startup to reach “unicorn” status after raising $100 million in a funding round that brings its valuation to $1.2 billion.

Andreessen Horowitz and General Catalyst led the Series C round, which also saw the participation of existing investors CEAS Investments and Matrix Partners, bringing its total amount raised to $163 million.

Fivetran sells a unique data integration platform to enterprises. It supplies “data connectors” that enable the smooth transfer of information from almost any source to a cloud data warehouse, from where it can be analyzed for business insights more easily.

The company’s platform does away with the need to build a data connector for each individual data source as it simply automates the entire process. It offers prebuilt data connectors that can automatically adjust to schema and application programming interface changes, helping ensure the continuity of data projects. Previously, companies would need to build complicated “extract, transform and load” or ETL pipelines for each data source, which is a difficult and resource-intensive task.

The main benefit of Fivetran’s data connectors is it means companies can easily combine data from multiple sources to get a more centralized view of their finances, marketing, sales and other business operations, the company said.

It also saves companies time. A recent survey by Dimensional Research found that the average data analyst spends only half of their time on actually analyzing data, with the rest of their efforts being spent on trying to access that information. As a result, 68% of those data analysts report having too little time available to implement “profit-driving ideas” that come about from the analysis they perform.

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Over the last 12 months, it has grown its customer base by more than 75%, with notable technology firms such as Autodesk Inc., Databricks Inc., DocuSign Inc. and Square Inc. adopting its platform. The company said its revenue has grown by 129% over the same period, though it didn’t provide absolute numbers.

“Fivetran completely changed our data extraction workflow,” said Evin Anderson, a data engineering manager at Autodesk. “We save a tremendous amount of time by eliminating the need to build and maintain data pipelines internally.”

Fivetrans’ technology has also been validated by Google LLC, which last year said it was using the firm’s data connectors to create a new Data Transfer Service for its BigQuery platform. BigQuery is a popular data warehouse service that’s used to store and analyze extremely large, read-only datasets. But customers had complained to Google that it was sometimes too difficult for them to funnel data to it from third-party sources, hence the decision to use Fivetran’s data transfer service.

Andreessen Horowitz General Partner David George said Fivetran’s platform is so powerful and so efficient that it has effectively become the “de facto standard” for enterprises looking to integrate data within modern information technology stacks. “They’ve also continued to perfect their automation process, providing customers with reliable, real-time data,” George said.

Analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. told SiliconANGLE that data extraction remains a big problem for many enterprises.

“Fragmentation of data sources and arcane integration tools are the key reasons why it’s so hard for enterprises to integrate and make more sense of their data,” Mueller said. “We’ll have to check in a few quarter’s time to see if the vendor invested the money well.”

Fivetran said it plans to use its new funds to further adoption of its data integration platform and add more connectors to cover more data sources.

Image: Xresch/Pixabay

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