Retool raises $45M at a $3.2B valuation
Hi all, founder @ Retool here. We've made a lot of progress over the past few years, but we first started on HN, and certainly wouldn't be here without all of you!<p>For example, here's when we launched: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14515494" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14515494</a>. Hilariously, we described Retool as "Excel with higher order primitives", and people understood it! (Only on HN!)<p>After that, we spent around a year polishing the product and getting customers, and we launched officially on HN: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17725966" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17725966</a>.<p>Today, we have tens of thousands of paying customers, are ~cashflow-positive, and have substantial revenue. But we are yet still so far from changing how internal software is built. Our thesis is that a Visual Basic-like application builder is a better way of building a certain segment of software (namely, internal CRUD apps). If you have any feedback or ideas on how we can improve the product, please do let me know (in comments or via email).<p>Oh, here's our blog post too: <a href="https://retool.com/blog/series-c2/" rel="nofollow">https://retool.com/blog/series-c2/</a>. It has some details about our weird fundraising strategy (smaller rounds, lower valuation), which we think is more employee-friendly (lower dilution, more upside for employees). Happy to talk through that as well; here's another article about it: <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2021/12/22/retool-unicorn-funding-round-follows-risky-employee-first-approach/" rel="nofollow">https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2021/12/22/retool-un...</a>