Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

Hi all! David, founder of Retool here. We’ve come a long way since we our very first Show HN (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=14515494" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=14515494</a>) and subsequent launch (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17725966" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17725966</a>)!<p>Briefly — Retool is a visual programming language, built specifically for building internal front-ends. The idea is that we can let you use a visual programming interface to get you 70% of the way there very quickly, and then let you customize the rest with code. This lets you build apps much faster, but also retains the customizability and flexibility of code.<p>We support writing JS anywhere between {{ }} [1], importing custom React components [2] , hosting on-prem [3] (can be setup in 5 minutes: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.retool.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;running-retool-locally" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.retool.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;running-retool-locally</a>), etc. And then once your applications are built in Retool, we manage the authentication (via SSO if you want), authorization (syncing with your groups in Okta via SCIM), and audit logs (can be stored in your own database, so you can build apps on top of it.)<p>One interesting differentiator is that we don&#x27;t store any data, and are happy to connect to any back-ends you already use (including both databases and rest &#x2F; graphql &#x2F; grpc endpoints).<p>Here’s a 4 minute demo video: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;d3399nw8s4ngfo.cloudfront.net&#x2F;videos&#x2F;intro-to-retool.mp4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;d3399nw8s4ngfo.cloudfront.net&#x2F;videos&#x2F;intro-to-retool...</a><p>HN is what got us this far, so if anybody has any comments &#x2F; suggestions, please feel free to let me know! We aim to be surprisingly responsive to HN feedback, since we’ve found it highly predictive of what developers in general want. Feel free to email me at david AT retool.com<p>edit: fixed video. Thanks!<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.retool.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;javascript-overview" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.retool.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;javascript-overview</a> 2. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.retool.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;custom-react-components" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.retool.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;custom-react-components</a> 3. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.retool.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;setup-instructions" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.retool.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;setup-instructions</a>

Congrats to Retool!<p>I worked with Retool when they were in the YC W17 batch. They were previously working on a p2p finance app for the UK, and I remember sitting in the conference room when they told me they were pivoting to Retool.<p>The Retool idea made immediate sense to me because at my prior startup we used django-admin to crank out internal pages and it was amazing. So it seemed clear to me that having something along those lines that was available in <i>every</i> programming environment would be useful, but it was harder for me to wrap my head around competing with free. This sort of reminds me of Algolia competing with Apache Solr - as it turns out can be a great business if you build a great product and really understand your customers. Also I did not appreciate the power of having a drag-and-drop interface, all of the integrations etc.<p>David and the whole Retool team have done a truly brilliant job executing since then, excellent work.

I&#x27;ve been using Retool very seriously over the past few months. It&#x27;s definitely helpful to iterate on some UI ideas and prototype. Once you want to do anything complicated that involves any sort of logic, it becomes very clunky since you&#x27;re trying to write JS in a tiny web-based code editor box. Refractors (e.g. changing a variable name or deleting a query) is kind of a nightmare since I can&#x27;t just search for it&#x27;s usage. I also wish it had support for a lightweight DB out of box instead of requiring one to always be present. Finally, it seems components have kind of inconsistent capabilities, like being able to trigger a query on certain events that you would expect, which limits their usefulness.<p>Overall I&#x27;d say it&#x27;s helpful but has a ways to go before being a useful replacement for most internal app use cases. It&#x27;s certainly promising though and hopefully this round of investment helps round off some of these rough spots in the product.

Congrats! Quick endorsement (no connection to company):<p>I discovered Retool fairly recently during a bout of frustration-with-our-designers-and-engineers-spending-too-much-time-on-internal tools.<p>We were fighting very very elementary bugs mostly because the people implementing our internal tools were just not thrilled about that work (vs. the customer-facing stuff) and there&#x27;s just a natural progression of common bugs when you&#x27;re building things from the ground up.<p>We are just about to launch our first full conversion from an internal tool to a Retool-powered one, and I&#x27;m super excited. We were able to get the project to 0 backend engineers, 1 frontend engineer (who gets some help w&#x2F; SQL queries), and 1 designer who works directly in Retool (which, to be fair, isn&#x27;t as powerful as Figma, but that&#x27;s actually a good thing!).<p>And for the product guy (me), I can go in and tweak things without filing a ticket and waiting for a test-review-deploy cycle. So the whole thing is just quicker and better for this use case. Now our team can focus 100% effort (or, at least 99%) on the customer-facing stuff, which is where we&#x27;re adding the most value anyway.<p>Suffice to say I&#x27;m very pleased so far.

Honestly I have seen Retool being used, and see developers love it. But the one thing I hate about Retool is that anything that a developer does on Retool is tech debt.<p>You want to do a quick form to manage an app ? Let&#x27;s build it on Retool, you will lose control of everything, you can&#x27;t improve the form, you don&#x27;t run the form, you can&#x27;t apply the usual code review, ...<p>Visual coding is great for people who don&#x27;t know how to code, but for developer that should be the thing to avoid at all cost. I have seen a company that instead of improving their coding environment they started progressively doing everything on Retool, what is going to happen the day Retool is down ? or increase their price ? or they bring a breaking change ? or ?<p>Don&#x27;t get me wrong, I think the product is amazing, but it requires huge discipline, and this is never a good idea to depend on the discipline of people

I think Retool continues in the trend of startups creating a formidable SaaS from something that is &quot;obviously useful&quot; to developers working with open source, and has become a &quot;tool of the trade&quot; for those developers, which reveals a wider market outside of that language&#x2F;platform-specific open source niche. Examples here are:<p>- Real-Time Sys&#x2F;App Dashboards (e.g. Graphite) =&gt; Datadog<p>- Collaborative Source Control (e.g. trac, hgweb) =&gt; GitHub<p>- Team Chat &amp; Bots (e.g. IRC, ZNC, Hubot) =&gt; Slack<p>- App Error Tracking (e.g. Raven&#x2F;Sentry project) =&gt; Sentry<p>In this case, the category is:<p>- Internal Admin Interface (e.g. Django Admin) =&gt; Retool<p>Like all of the above categories, this category is obvious in retrospect.<p>Every SaaS product&#x2F;company I have ever worked on or advised has leveraged a Django admin interface. Or, the team wished it had one once they went into production with real users, if the technology choice _wasn&#x27;t_ Python&#x2F;Django.<p>If you have never personally experienced a the Django admin interface, you can read about it and see screenshots in this tutorial: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;docs&#x2F;Learn&#x2F;Server-side&#x2F;Django&#x2F;Admin_site" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;docs&#x2F;Learn&#x2F;Server-side&#x2F;D...</a><p>Essentially, it gives you a web-based interface, hooking into your existing user&#x2F;group authentication model, for inspecting (and even altering!) live production data by introspecting your &quot;Django Models&quot;. That is, your Python classes which represent your production SQL tables lead to (controlled!) admin interfaces that can edit those tables.<p>You can extend that admin interface using simple declarative configuration, such that you can build functional, SQL-aware tables and forms without writing a lick of UI code.<p>Based on the demo video, Retool is even more featureful than the Django Admin (although perhaps a little less extensible, since it isn&#x27;t based on an open source framework). But, for anyone thinking to themselves, &quot;Why didn&#x27;t I think of this?&quot; -- perhaps give some thought to the root problems beneath some of the open source tools you&#x27;re using today, that could perhaps be turned into a widely-applicable SaaS tomorrow.

I am trying to build a simple user registration&#x2F;sign in and view your contents website and yes it takes hours or days to do in React&#x2F;Vue&#x2F;Angluar + Backend. So by process of elimination:<p>I tried replacing the backend with just Google Firestore. Surprisingly to do this on react, it&#x27;s a hell lot of code. I don&#x27;t mind writing the code but it&#x27;s just ridiculously complicated and hard to reason the complexity.<p>I thought of just bootstrap with jQuery with Firestore but then you have to do all the session management which will again devolve into a shit ton of code.<p>Finally decided to ditch all this and just go with Wix. Wix has definitely come a long way in terms of building websites. I can build a user registration form in minutes and have the whole site up in like less than 2 hours.<p>Retool offers much much more than Wix so I see a bright future. One of the shortcomings of Wix is lack of component embedding. Essentially you are limited to passing control between pages. If Retool offers component embedding, that&#x27;s a huge win IMO.<p>Good luck folks and congratulations on the fund raise.

I&#x27;ve been using retool for a year, and very heavily for some large internal tools for the last month. I find some of its design rather inspired. Its been massively helpful and surprisingly easy to use. Even for some relatively complicated tasks.<p>We are hitting the limits of its capability. Which is when applications get complicated or end up with lots of code. The javascript you write in your tool is running inside many layers of retool javascription and encapsulation.<p>But at this point if we decide to move such an app out of Retool, then the business logic is already written.

I tried this product thinking it would be super useful... not the case. Ended up spending a few days total rolling our own internal tools and way happier we did. I love leveraging saas products but this one just fell flat for me. It felt too constraining.<p>Curious to hear from a real customer of theirs how they are using this service?

Congrats to the Retool team! I got a chance to meet David and Anthony when they were working out of their apartment and I was incredibly impressed with how fast they were able to innovate&#x2F;build. Kevin White from Segment who was an amazing head of growth marketing joined their team as well, so I&#x27;m confident it&#x27;s only a matter of time until we see them become the next big thing!

Wow - really cool &amp; congrats...<p>Sort of reminds me of a handful of RegBI tools - like Periscope Data. But the marketing&#x2F;positioning is &quot;this is for internal teams&quot;. I suppose another important difference here is that you can write to the database from the interface. The API out-of-the-box is pretty neat too.<p>I gave it a quick spin after watching the demo. Large tables take a while to refresh. I dont know if thats just extra load on the servers after the announcement. I would imagine getting latency down, especially for queries with many columns or rows, would be important to UX.

We’ve been using Retool for the past few months and I just want to say thanks. It’s saved us a slew of time and y’all are always responsive to any issues I’ve run into.

I remember someone suggesting that when you write a web app you should prototype the design with the client until they like it and then build the backend. Could something like this let you create a front end responsive design but leave the logic to the backend where you can then make whatever design decisions you want to?<p>Edit: Also, a huge congratulations!

Congrats! Well deserved - Retool is an excellent product in my opinion. So much CRUD code saved.

Congrats! We built our admin tools in Retool. I was surprised with how simple it was to get started and launch our tools in a few hours. Great docs as well. 2 years later our tools continue to work perfectly without changes. Cheers to the future :)

I&#x27;d be curious to know what the investors see as a path to success here.<p>This tool strikes me as confusing for non-programmers and too limited for programmers.<p>What is this meant to compete with, what&#x27;s the use case?

Are there any open source alternatives to retool? We’re uncomfortable using a third party tool for our internal operational workflows without more visibility into the source

Wow - congrats. I love the tool. Active user through a year.

Retool seems pretty awesome so far! I got an immediately useful admin panel working in about 20 minutes today.

Congrats! How does it compare against AirTable and Metabase?

Nice :)

100% Agreed! Defining logic in JS is quite clunky for these sorts of tools.<p>I&#x27;m biased[1], but for this reason we took the approach of creating a spreadsheet from scratch for the sole purpose of creating logic for apps (both internal tools &amp; customer facing UX).<p>Would be curious to get the everyone&#x27;s input on our spreadsheet-driven approach -- thoughts?<p>[1] I&#x27;m biased, because I&#x27;m the founder of: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mintdata.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mintdata.com</a><p>[2] But this example shows what I mean by the &quot;a spreadsheet is better to define logic than JS&quot; approach:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mintdata.com&#x2F;showcase&#x2F;photo-finder&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mintdata.com&#x2F;showcase&#x2F;photo-finder&#x2F;</a>

I think this is a fantastic way to describe it!<p>I spent 5 years in the 90s creating a WYSIWYG tool with Visual Basic 6 , and VB6 was a life saver.<p>I think retool is a fantastic, modern-day re-incarnation of that.<p>However, I think when the UX is important -- that is, a rich, pixel-perfect design combined with robust facilities to define custom app logic, a principles-first approach has to be taken.<p>We&#x27;ve taken one stab at this, to say that logic should be defined in a spreadsheet specifically tailored for the app-building purpose, and I think only time will tell if this approach is right. [1]<p>[1] Take with a grain of salt, I&#x27;m the founder of<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mintdata.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mintdata.com</a>