Just launched in 2017, Retool, a San Francisco based startup allowing developers and engineers to build software quickly with their drag and drop based WYSIWYG platform and robust integration with databases and other cloud based software through APIs has raised $50M in Series B funding round led by Sequoia Capital with help from other investors which also include Stripe’s founders, Patrick Collison and John Collison, GitHub’s CEO, Nat Friedman, Y Combinator’s Co-founder, Paul Graham, Segment’s CEO, Peter Reinhardt, Gusto’s Co-founder, Josh Reeves and former Twitter’s Vice President, Elad Gil.
After this round, the total raised amount by Retool so far has reached $75M but the most exciting part is the valuation of the Retool which is set at $925M (almost $1B). It’s a great news for the Retool that’s just founded few years ago by its 25 years old CEO, David Hsu.
Retool claims that using its platform, developers can save 70% of their time in front-end development and almost 30% in back-end development. Retool also claims to have made companies save millions of dollars from their software development costs. Retool aims to change the way how software is built by the developers. Eventually they want developers to build software quickly with least efforts however for now they have started with development of tools for internal use of companies. Using their platform, companies can build quick internal tools for their use which can help them automate their routine jobs or build custom dashboards based on related data to build better insight about their jobs and make better decisions.
David Hsu, a 25 year-old software engineer, founded Retool in 2017 after realizing how much time he wasted building internal applications in a similar way over and over again. “Lots of engineers fundamentally don’t want to do that,” he said.
The company says its service helps developers build applications up to 40 times faster while retaining the flexibility of writing their own code. Customers include Amazon.com Inc., Daimler AG’s Mercedes-Benz, Progressive Corp., Peloton Interactive Inc. and Rakuten Inc.
Bryan Schreier, partner at Sequoia, said he was drawn to Retool based on his experience at Google. Schreier oversaw a team building internal tools and he said most of his colleagues were “desperate to do just about anything else.”
“There is a tendency to glorify a billion-dollar valuation,” Hsu said. “We want to signal that to people that we are just getting started.”
Please read full story at Bloomberg.