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Retool raises $45M at a $3.2B valuation

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31–40 of 153 posts

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

#31
Congratulations on the funding! I built multiple unusual internal apps for our product last year. Retool is now in my list of "must have" for any thing I build.

The build process took a bit of time and I had to hire an expert on Upwork. Not everyone might persevere. A gallery with examples of varying complexity would make the sell easier.

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

#32
post #9

I dont understand how an apparently billion dollar company still requires to raise 45 million. Can someone ELI5 the economics of this?

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…

[deleted]

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

#33

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)?

If you’ve ever worked in the real world, you’d know that the technical debt produced by developers who think they can build no-code alternatives in 10 hours is far worse than any technical debt these tools could produce.

10% of the code we write produces 90% of the value: retool etc. allow us to spend much less time on the 90% of code that isn’t valuable to the businesses we work for.

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

#34
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.

I think fundraising is more about setting a price on the company. I mean, now we know retool is valued at 3.2 billion, it is probably 20-40x revenue, may be more.

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

#35
post #9

I dont understand how an apparently billion dollar company still requires to raise 45 million. Can someone ELI5 the economics of this?

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…

Are you using this opportunity to let employees sell stock to investors as secondary? Because giving employees liquidity for their ESOP would be a great reason, other than marketing and feel-good.

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

#36
post #19
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…

With names like the Stripe founders and the GitHub founder on the list, perhaps fundraising is also a way to get those well-connected people's skin in the game? They might be good routes to new customers or other connections good for growing the business.

> All are previous investors in the company.

They already were investors from previous rounds.

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

#38
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…

I have nothing todo with Retool, but I'm curious about the problem you are trying to solve. What do you want to consume the mock api?

a) Is this for rapid prototypes? (web? mobile?) b) Do you have a microservice architecture and you want to mock out one of the services? (dev? ci?) c) something else?

Lets say the generator looks at your schema and generates an api, how much would you want to tweak/customize that api?

Is the mock api returning data based on what's in the database? If so, can the mock api mutate data in the database?

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

#39
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…

Just to say that we're actively switching away from retool because you insist on charging £10 a month users who are a simply view form thats already built. I can understand charging for building and launching a form, I can understand charging something for a view only, but the same as builder? na I think not. Good luck with your pricing

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

#40
post #9

I dont understand how an apparently billion dollar company still requires to raise 45 million. Can someone ELI5 the economics of this?

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…

[deleted]
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