Productivity startup Airtable closes $735M funding round at $11B valuation

Productivity startup Airtable Inc. has closed a $735 million investment at a pre-money valuation of $11 billion, nearly twice the $5.77 billion it was worth following its previous funding round in March. 

The new capital will support Airtable’s effort to expand its presence in the enterprise market. The San Francisco-based startup announced the funding round this morning. The company has raised more than $1.3 billion in funding to date. 

Airtable provides a cloud-based productivity platform that helps teams organize business data. The main feature provided by the platform is the ability to create spreadsheets, or bases as the startup calls them. Unlike a traditional spreadsheet, an Airtable base can include not only text and numbers but also a variety of other elements, from file attachments to graphs that visualize quarterly sales data.

To make navigating data stored in its platform easier, Airtable offers a variety of interface settings. A base containing outstanding tasks, for example software bugs that need to be fixed, can be turned into a timeline to visualize the order in which the individual to-do items should be completed. A base featuring data about a retailer’s store sales can be turned into a map that breaks down revenue by city.

Airtable’s platform is reportedly used by more than 300,000 organizations. Following its latest funding round, the startup plans to double down on the enterprise segment.

Airtable already has a significant presence in the enterprise: The startup counts more than 80% of the firms on the Fortune 100 list as customers. To expand its market reach, the startup has been developing new features optimized for the requirements of large organizations.

Last month, Airtable debuted Interface Designer, a tool that enables enterprise users to build simple applications on its platform without writing any code. Applications created using Interface Designer work with data stored in Airtable bases. A marketing team, for example, could create a base to track ad performance statistics and then build an application that visualizes the statistics in an easy-to-use dashboard.

For users with more advanced requirements, Airtable offers automation features. Workers can create workflows to automate common tasks such as syncing data between two bases. Tech-savvy teams can customize workflows with JavaScript code to perform more sophisticated tasks.

Airtable is targeting a large market with its no-code and low-code tools. According to research from Gartner Inc., there will be four times more citizen developers at large enterprises by 2023 than professional developers. 

Airtable may use some of the new funding for acquisitions to help accelerate the pace at which it can bring enterprise-focused features to market. The startup made its first acquisition this past August. Airtable bought Technologies Inc., a fellow startup that develops data visualization software.

To accelerate its effort to win over more large organizations, Airtable will expand product development efforts. The startup also plans to grow its enterprise sales, customer success and support teams. “This additional capital will allow us to invest even more aggressively in product development and to scale a team and infrastructure capable of supporting a much larger, worldwide customer base,” said Airtable co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Howie Liu.

The reason the enterprise market represents a major opportunity for Airtable has to do with the versatility of the startup’s platform. Airtable bases can be used for many different tasks across a variety of teams, from the marketing department to the engineering organization. As a result, a large enterprise may have upwards of thousands of employees who could potentially benefit from Airtable’s platform. That translates into numerous sales opportunities. 

It’s possible that Airtable’s new $735 million funding round will be one of the last it raises before going public. Multiple other productivity software providers, among them Asana Inc. and Monday.com Ltd., have gone public in recent years.

Similarly to Airtable, Asana and Monday.com provide workflow automation features as part of their respective platforms.

Airtable’s funding round was led by investment firm XN with participation from several new investors. They included Michael Dell’s MSD Capital, the venture capital arm of Salesforce.com Inc., Franklin Templeton, J.P. Morgan Growth Equity Partners, Silver Lake and T. Rowe Price Associates. More than a half-dozen returning backers participated as well.

Image: Airtable