Fivetran, an emerging leader in data pipelining

Fivetran, fast growing player in data pipelining for data warehouse, did a superb session yesterday during the IT Press Tour.

Founded in 2012 following a Y-Combinator campaign, Fivetran took several years to build the product with a first customer shipment in 2015. Currently with 110+ employees, the company raised $15M in series A in December 2018 after a seed round of $120K in March 2013.

We have the opportunity to meet the 2 founders, George Fraser, CEO, and Taylor Brown, COO, and they did a brilliant job.

The classic analytics data stack is changing from aa legacy "Sources -> ETL -> DW -> BI Tool" to a new approach more aligned to the new demand based to higher volume and real time requirements. With tons of products in each layers, the combination is high.

ETL or Extract, Transform and Load is a good but old model and had difficulties to follow the cloud adoption, pretty obvious as the data volume for analysis skyrockets. The current trend is a cloud-based DW, columnar, zero infrastructure management and above all a clear separation of compute and storage. Solutions such Google BigQuery, Amazon Redshift or Snowflake are the new norm for a few quarters now. As an example of this new need, Google has recently acquired Alooma in that space and continue to build a comprehensive stack with Trifacta an soon others for sure.

The new approach supported by several vendors initiative is ELT for Extract. Load and Transform, this latter task made later in the process.

Fivetran, one of the new players, develops probably one of the most advanced data pipelining, fully managed, zero configuration with a as-a-Service approach. It provides today 100+ connectors.

The company has today 600+ customers and it's growing pretty fast and it should grow even faster soon. Fivetran continues to strengthen its partner ecosystem and especially around Google Cloud, Snowflake and Looker with of course tons of others. In terms of business, it grows fast with triple of the revenue on 2018 globally and even 8 times in EMEA.

IT was a really a good session, something is happening there.