Airbyte, a rising star in the burgeoning data integration space, has just announced that it is now valued at $1.5 billion thanks to a $150 million investment co-led by Altimeter Capital and Coatue Management.
This Series B is coming on the heels of a massive wave of growth for the San Francisco startup, which raised a $5 million seed round led by Accel in March shortly after it launched in September of 2020. The company also raised a $26 million Series A led by Benchmark in June.
“Airbyte has already made a huge impact in a very short period of time,” Jamin Ball, a partner at Altimeter Capital, said in a statement. “There is tremendous market momentum on top of Airbyte’s disruptive model to involve its users in building the ecosystem around its data integration platform.”
Indeed, Airbyte’s meteoric rise history closely tracks with the increased investor attention the entire data integration industry has been getting lately. Fivetran, a competitor to Airbyte, hit unicorn valuation in June of 2020, then raised a whopping $565 million Series D round last September. It also acquired another data integration startup, HVR, for $700 million. Meanwhile, open-source players like GitLab and HashiCorp made public debuts in recent months.
In less than two years, Airbyte has managed to catch up to these incumbents, unifying different types of data from disparate sources so that they can be used for everything from analytics to predictive modeling. Plus, it’s all open-source, which means it is easier for data teams to create connectors that will work within their own unique data infrastructure since they can be built in any programming language and deployed on any platform in a matter of minutes.
These capabilities are key components of the modern data stack, a set of cloud computing tools to store and harness large quantities of data — especially as most companies continue to operate remotely.
“With the rise of the modern data warehouses, our mission is to power all the organizations’ data movement and doesn’t end at ELT,” Airbyte’s co-founder and CEO Michel Tricot said in a statement, referring the extract/load/transform process in which data is extracted from one source and loaded into a target data warehouse. “By the end of 2022, we will cover more types of data movement, including reverse-ETL and streaming ingestion.”
To get this done, the newly minted unicorn says it will use this fresh funding to aggressively expand its operations and grow its team, tweeting that it plans to go from 30 to 200 employees by the end of next year. Airbyte currently has dozens of open, remote-friendly tech positions available now.
