Airtable: the application platform that’s redefining software
Today, I’m proud to announce that CRV is doubling down on our investment in Airtable, co-leading a $52M Series B investment alongside Caffeinated Capital, with participation from Freestyle Capital and Slow Ventures. CRV also led the Series A investment in Airtable, where I currently sit on the Board of Directors.
I first came across Airtable three years ago, when it was a small team of four people with a beta product. I was looking at the enterprise productivity and collaboration software category and had been chasing a thesis around product-first founders. I was generally disappointed with how narrow some of the solutions were, and often how founders over-indexed on early vanity metrics and revenue growth at the expense of quality software and a positive consumer experience. Through a set of circumstances, I was introduced to Howie Liu, CEO at Airtable, in early 2015. It’s such a cliché, but it’s true — within 10 minutes I knew I wanted to back Howie.
For those who have not had the privilege of meeting Howie, he is not only one of the nicest people you’ll ever meet, but also the most brilliant product minds you’ll come across. Howie made the fundamental observation that software applications could be constructed easily with a flexible, API-driven database, when made as approachable as a spreadsheet. He laid out a vision for a software platform so powerful, that it could re-define the enterprise software landscape. Combining these fundamental constructs, Howie, Andrew and Emmett built Airtable — a flexible, collaborative, API-driven database/spreadsheet hybrid — to fill the gaps for modern software applications.
I was absolutely floored by the enormity of this vision and the depth of thinking. If Airtable’s vision held true, this platform could disrupt many existing software categories and displace thousands of long-tail SaaS applications. Weeks later, in spring 2015, I led a pre-emptive Series A investment in the company.
I’ve watched this team surgically work its craft for years — refining product, talking to customers, crunching the data — over and over again. Building a platform is one of the most challenging feats for any startup, let alone a small team taking on the potentially massive feature creep around productivity & collaboration software. Simplifying the experience is subtle but extremely difficult, and I was delighted to watch the Airtable team adeptly navigate this. As months and years went on, the outpouring of love and respect for Airtable continued to flood in and has translated to meteoric growth in activity on the platform.
Today, I’m proud to say that Airtable is not only one of the best software products that CRV has witnessed in the last decade, it’s also one of the fastest revenue growth software companies we’ve backed in our 48-year history (CRV was an early investor in companies such as Zendesk, Yammer, Hubspot, Dropbox, Udacity, Xamarin, Drift and many others). In fact, the growth was so compelling that CRV decided to double down on our Series A investment, by co-leading a $52M Series B investment into Airtable to support its next phase. It’s rare enough to find a company that has this enormous revenue growth; it’s even rarer to find the combination of that, and also an off-the-charts level of product enthusiasm.
My CRV partners and I stand behind Howie Liu, Andrew Ofstad and Emmett Nicholas, and congratulate them and their team on this amazing milestone! Airtable is well on its way to achieving the exact vision that Howie and his co-founders laid out when I first met them, and CRV is so proud to be a part of their journey.
-Max Gazor
