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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

#111

Post by alextapper »

pxue wrote: post #105
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…

Hey David, late last year my cofounder convinced me to try out Retool so we can rapidly spin up a prototype for a potential customer. We spun up the prototype in a couple of weeks without much hassle. It was a huge success. so much so that the customer who we created the prototype for decided to invest 6 figures into our business. it's 6 months later, albeit we've outgrown the prototype, I've learnt valuable lesson i…

Alex here from the Retool team. We recently added a feature to write tests in your Retool apps: https://docs.retool.com/docs/testing

Coming to CI soon as well: https://docs.retool.com/docs/testing-in-ci

Thanks for being a customer! Glad that it worked out for you and your team :)

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

#112

Post by Aeolun »

I really want a single retool docker image that I can just run locally to test it out. I think the last time I tried finding that it didn’t exist, and I didn’t really feel like setting up a whole docker compose stack just to see if it worked.

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

#113

Post by targ65 »

Does this remind anyone else of FileMaker Pro? I remember I used FileMaker in my teen years (mid 90s) to build an application to help my parents manage my condo building expenses. Very simiilar concept but of course the world has changed since then, so today you'd need what retool offers (connectivity to cloud databases, building web app vs macos apps, etc). But it's funny how after 20 years old ideas become new again.

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

#114

Post by Aeolun »

phonon wrote: post #66

Will you be increasing your OSS financial support? Retool uses many Open Source libraries, and given your financial position, it seems incommensurate with the total support to date of $50,250. [0] [0] https://opencollective.com/retool

The fact that they’ve given at all is a good thing. Don’t go bashing the good ones.

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

#115

Post by Aeolun »

dvdhsu wrote: post #9
artemonster wrote: post #8

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…

Why would it be a bad idea to post revenue metrics? Most public companies do exactly that thing right?

I think it’s hilarious that the reasoning for fundraising is ‘free publicity’ here though :)

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

#116

Post by aswinmohanme »

I have ported a backoffice app from Phoenix LiveView to a Retool(Frontend) + Vercel(Api) + Supabase(database) collection and it's holding out really great. The primitives of Retool (autoupdating queries, transformers, direct integration to the database, staging and production environments) makes feature development super fast. You guys are on to something great, keep going strong.

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

#118

Post by hanniabu »

antonybello wrote: post #108
barking_biscuit wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, how new is the new free plan? A co-worker of mine linked me this recently saying it might be good for some internal tooling (which I totally agree!) and I wanted to hack around with it in anger on my own first before being comfortable making any sort of pitch internally for it but when I checked the free plan (at the time) it put me off. But now it looks like quite a bit more friendly...

Hi! It’s hot off the press— we just launched it today!

Hey, I started a free trial a while back and didn't have the time to dig in, but this post made me go back and check it out. I have a red message bar at top saying "Your trial has ended. You will be unable to create or edit Retool pages."and it seems I can't use the new free plan.

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

#119

Post by tsemenov »

hanniabu wrote: post #118
antonybello wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi! It’s hot off the press— we just launched it today!

Hey, I started a free trial a while back and didn't have the time to dig in, but this post made me go back and check it out. I have a red message bar at top saying "Your trial has ended. You will be unable to create or edit Retool pages."and it seems I can't use the new free plan.

Hi there, so sorry to hear that. I’d try visiting our billing page under settings/billing and see if you can select the free plan from there. If that doesn’t work, send me a note at timofey@retool.com and we’d be happy to fix this

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

#120

Post by hanniabu »

dvdhsu wrote: post #86
no_wizard wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ah, we still have a way of generating mock APIs: https://retool.com/api-generator . You can upload a CSV (we'll parse the columns and guess types for each one), and then generate mock data and put it into an AIP for you: https://retool.com/utilities/generate-api-from-csv . In the future, we'd love to make it more robust; we're currently working on a database-y product (think Airtable, but backed by postgres). It woul…

Wow this is amazing, how have I not seen this before. Looking forward to all the continued improvements and additional features!
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