Airtable is a hybrid spreadsheet and database platform company founded by Emmett Nicholas, Andrew Ofstad, and Howie Liu that raised $100 million in Series C funding at a $1.1 billion valuation this week. This round of funding was led Thrive Capital, Benchmark, and Coatue Management.
Existing investors CRV and Caffeinated Capital participated in this round along with strategic angel investors Delphine Arnault, Emily Weiss, Alexa von Tobel, Sarah Smith, and Dan Rose. With this round of funding, Airtable is going to expand internationally and build its team.
Currently, Airtable is used by more than 80,000 organizations including Airbnb, Tesla Motors, The City of Los Angeles, Carnival Cruise Line, WeWork, and half of the Fortune 1000, according to VentureBeat. Plus Airtable is likely going to hit ten times the amount of revenue it generated last year — which was already up 500% from 2016.
“Airtable’s vision is to empower anyone to become a software creator,” said Ofstad via Fast Company. “Executing on that opportunity involves a daunting set of design challenges—designing the product, designing the business, and designing the organization—and this funding round enables us to pursue it with the merited level of ambition.”
One of the reasons why Airtable became popular is because its spreadsheet program includes features that are more sophisticated than Google Docs and Microsoft Excel. For example, every cell in the spreadsheet program can store files like photos. And you can easily create custom apps through Airtable as well.
There are several templates that can be set up when you create a new file. These templates include Event Planning and Real Estate. And there are categories that can be set like Book Catalog, Groups, and Hobbies.
According to Business Insider, Liu sold his first company Etacts to Salesforce in 2010 when he was 21 years old. One year later, he started Airtable with the other founders and convinced Ashton Kutcher — who also invested in Etacts — to invest in the new company while in his trailer on the set of the show Two and a Half Men.
Some of the apps are compatible with Airtable include Box, Dropbox, Eventbrite, Evernote, Facebook, Gmail, Instagram, LinkedIn, Meetup, Pocket, Slack, Stripe, SoundCloud, Tumblr, Twilio, Twitter, WordPress, YouTube, and Zendesk. And it also works with workflow automation platforms like IFTTT and Zapier.
