Airtable raises $7.6M to be your database provider

The company has hired Facebook's Francis Larkin as its new Vice President of Growth

When someone says the word "database" to me, what I picture in my head is something that I would find really confusing and which takes a lot of expertise and training to understand. And, for the most part, that is probably pretty accurate.

Airtable wants to dispel that notion, making databases so easy to use that the average person can start to use them, and affordable as well.

The company announced on Monday that it has raised $7.6 million in Series A funding. The round was led by CRV with participation from Brennan O'Donnell, VP Sales & Customer Success at SurveyMonkey; Ilya Sukhar, Founder of Parse and Director of Product Management at Facebook; Joshua Reeves, CEO & Co-Founder at ZenPayroll; Kevin Mahaffey, Co-Founder and CTO at Lookout; and Othman Laraki, Co-founder of Color Genomics).

Funding also came from existing seed investors Freestyle Capital, Caffeinated Capital, DCVC, Crunchfund, and Founder Collective, among others.

Airtable had previously raised $3 million in February, bringing its total capital to $10.6 million.

Founded in 2012, Airtable is a modern database created for everyone. The company lets its users organize and store almost anything, chat with teammates, and see changes as they happen. Airtable syncs across devices.

Howie Liu, founder and CEO of Airtable, had previously Etacts, an email management platform for people who handle large volumes of email on a daily basis. The company was sold to Salesforce in 2010, and that is when Liu saw some of the problems facing the database space.

"I saw productivity and database world, and learned from Marc Benioff. While working there I had an ephiany. The vast majority of software was not exciting new tech, it was the reinvention of same wheel," he told me in an interview.

The service was not only rigid, not allowing users to customize their database, but expensive as well, costing tens of thousands of dollars for customers to build out to exactly what you want to keep track of with their database.

"With Airtable we wanted to take idea of giving people fully customizable software, give it to the mainstream person and consumerize that experience. You can use Airtable the same way as spreadsheet, except that under our database you get more robust apps," said Liu.

Airtable can be used by a small business or even an individual. A farmers can use it it to keep track of cattle, politicians for tracking campaign events, non-profits for donor tracking or individuals for things like wedding planning or job searches.

For example, one non-profit which helps pair students to get into college,, which had a team of 10 people, were keeping track of their donors in spreadsheet, which wasn't working due to clerical data errors. They started using Airtable for that purpose, as a  one for one replacement of spreadsheet, except now they could create structures and columns, things you can't do in a free-form spreadsheet. Over time, as it used Airtable more, the company began to evolve more use cases for more functionality.

"We ran an evolution of what the workspace looked like, and it was perfect linear growth, with more tables for things like donation records, different client records. They now have over 20 different tables, and hundreds, if not thousands, of columns," Liu said.

"We think of it as a small teams product. That might be an SMB, or, in many cases, a team within a department of a bigger company. We are never trying to become the central CRM for a large company, this is for 30 people or less working at one thing at a time."

One way that Airtable sets itself apart from Salesforce is its flexibility, but the other big difference is the price. Airtable offers four price plans: a free plan, one or $12 a month, one for $24 a month, and a negotiated enterprise plan. The difference between the $12 and $24 plans is on the amount of data that is being kept track of.

Salesforce, on the other hand, requires a consultant to set up, which costs tens of thousands of dollars alone. It also does not offer a free plan, meaning that it is just not an affordable option for the average small business or individual consumer. 

The new funding will go toward building out the platform,

"We see this as a horizontal, rather than narrowly specific, tool. We are building it out to be stable and secure. We  think of it as a Lego block kit, or a  not assembled product," said Liu. "This requires a  greater amount of research and development to bolster the community on top of us, because we will be here for the long haul. We see a long term opportunity around this product."

The company will also be expanding its eight member team.

"We are strong believers in the capability of small, highly elite teams, instead of drilling with tons of people. In the next year or so, we planing bringing on another five plus people on product and engineers, and another few in growth and marketing."

Airtable is already announcing one new hire: Francis Larkin as its Vice President of Growth. In this role he oversee marketing, communications and partnerships at the company.

Larkin previously spent five years at Facebook, where he was the Director of Product Marketing and led a global marketing team responsible for Facebook's developer platform, news and video products, and F8 conference. 

"We connected through mutual contacts. Howie and I first met over breakfast, and we talked about our early days in high school, played with programming, and those shared experiences and how fulfilling it was, but also strangely unavailable for most. In Silicon Valley, not everyone can access the power of a database and its intimidating for people," Larkin told me.

His goal at Airtable is to make databases more ubiquitous, and to give people the tools to help them know how to use them.

"At Facebook I was doing product marketing, making sure products were good fit for users and customers. All of the things we build for consumers, SMBs, enterprises, we want want to talk in a way that solves their problems. In the next few months we will be creating content people need to understand our products. Its much simpler to use than excel, but we expect they are going to need some help. A big part of growth depends on how we get a lot people using the service," he said.

"One thing I loved about Facebook was working on the Like button, and Facebook Login, now Connect. These had been around for a long time, and for most engineers they were nothing complex, but Facebook brought it to a wide audience and shared it with third parties. It is going to take us some time, but we will put the power of databases in more hands."

Airtable sees the opportunity ahead of it as greenfield, as it establishes that is essentially a new category. And it wants to use that opportunity to bring computing to people who don't have access to it now. This, Liu said, will have a big impact on society.

"Our greatest computer visionaries have said that, in recent times, biggest thing that is lacking is that the majority of people are still left out of the full power of computers. They can't create software. Sure, Code Academy and Code.org are teaching people how to write code, but I take a contrarian view on that. Yes, people should all be able to create software, but from the standpoint of the right way to accomplish that goal, I think more intuitive products will help more.