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Retool raises $45M at a $3.2B valuation

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Re: Retool raises $45M at a $3.2B valuation

#21

Post by esprehn »

pointlessone wrote: post #14
dvdhsu wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We actually didn't need the money (we're cashflow-positive). In fact, we haven't touched the money from our Series B (in 2020) nor our Series C (in 2021). But raising money is helpful because a) it gets prospective customers interested in the product (oh, X company raised, let me check out what their product does), b) it gets prospective employees interested, c) it allows people externally to see that the company is…

Wouldn't saying "we're actually profitable" be better? a) you still get into news (though for a different reason), b) gives prospective employees sense of stability, c) being profitable seems like good progress in my book, and d) no dilution for existing employees, not even a little.

Not especially so. Profitable could mean many things and doesn't carry scale or risk. Doing a funding round means you were externally assessed at a value, and that investors are willing to take a certain level of risk on your company. Nothing the company says can carry that weight or detail while still keeping their metrics private.

Re: Retool raises $45M at a $3.2B valuation

#22

Post by no_wizard »

dvdhsu wrote: post #2

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! For example, here's when we launched: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14515494 . Hilariously, we described Retool as "Excel with higher order primitives", and people understood it! (Only on HN!) After that, we spent around a year polishing the product…

I do see you pivoted away from some developer tooling things, like mock APIs generated from your database schema (that was a thing previous, no?). While I see you have the mock api generator service, I seem to recall you guys had a more robust paid offering that would read your database schema and spin up a mock API.

Any reason you pivoted away from that product? I quite literally am in search of a company that will do this that doesn't also want to be our API provider in production.

EDIT: I also want to point out, I really like how mature the product has become from the time I looked into it last (I wan to say maybe a year ago, maybe year and half). Seriously considering replacing some internal admin functionality with it.

Re: Retool raises $45M at a $3.2B valuation

#23

Post by monkeydust »

As someone on the product side I am getting more bullish each day on low-code tooling as it gets increasingly hard to source and retain engineering talent.

Whist it might comes with downsides and limitations I think the positives in terms of time-to-market and cost outweigh these on balance for many types of needs (not all for sure).

Congrats.

Re: Retool raises $45M at a $3.2B valuation

#24

Post by mousetree »

Congrats. We're big fans of Retool! We're a neobank and use Retool for all of our internal customer service, operations and compliance apps.

Our subscription is now up for renewal and it looks like we're in for a big price increase as we transition from a handful of shared users to 50+ named users + granular permissions. We're still a very small startup (Looking forward to continuing to build on Retool!

Re: Retool raises $45M at a $3.2B valuation

#25

Post by hestefisk »

So a company that produces something which “RAD” tools have tried to do since approx 1990 is valued at how much again? Read a product description from a RAD environment such as Delphi or VBA or a 4GL like Rational and you will find almost the same language. I would not touch this with a ten foot pole; it’s a massive lock in / walled garden.

Re: Retool raises $45M at a $3.2B valuation

#26

Post by jongjong »

nrmitchi wrote: post #17
dvdhsu wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We actually didn't need the money (we're cashflow-positive). In fact, we haven't touched the money from our Series B (in 2020) nor our Series C (in 2021). But raising money is helpful because a) it gets prospective customers interested in the product (oh, X company raised, let me check out what their product does), b) it gets prospective employees interested, c) it allows people externally to see that the company is…

> TBH, fundraising is kind of like charades: it's a way to signal you are doing well, without telling people your private company metrics. I hate that this is the answer. Edit, for clarification. I don't hate that this is Retool's answer , I hate that this is how the world actually works.

These days, companies mostly seem to be raising money from gatekeepers to protect them from their own gatekeeping.

Re: Retool raises $45M at a $3.2B valuation

#28

Post by shubhamjain »

Congrats to the team! Retool is a fantastic product. I commend the vision of the founding team to keep the focus on internal tooling and "devs" as the core of its market. I wish more people realized that "no-code" is a delusion. You need someone to create the logic, and wire things together. The right approach is the re-tool approach. Give devs the ability to create powerful tools by helping them focus on what's important.

Re: Retool raises $45M at a $3.2B valuation

#29

Post by intelVISA »

monkeydust wrote: post #23

As someone on the product side I am getting more bullish each day on low-code tooling as it gets increasingly hard to source and retain engineering talent. Whist it might comes with downsides and limitations I think the positives in terms of time-to-market and cost outweigh these on balance for many types of needs (not all for sure). Congrats.

From the other side I can't imagine using no-code and inhering that tech debt when the equivalent software can be written by 1 skilled SWE in a day(ish), is it really cheaper than about 10 quality manhours (~$5k)?

Re: Retool raises $45M at a $3.2B valuation

#30

Post by phphphphp »

monkeydust wrote: post #23

As someone on the product side I am getting more bullish each day on low-code tooling as it gets increasingly hard to source and retain engineering talent. Whist it might comes with downsides and limitations I think the positives in terms of time-to-market and cost outweigh these on balance for many types of needs (not all for sure). Congrats.

As a pragmatic software engineer: same. The code by default era can’t end soon enough, we shouldn’t be carrying the burden of our own inferior versions of things that already exist. A decade from now we will look back on the amount of code written now as a puzzling artifact of the past.

Code when a ceiling has been reached with existing tools is the future — a ceiling which is getting higher and higher, thanks to Retool etc.

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