After 13 Years in Business, Fivetran Expands to Offer Full Data Movement Capabilities
Fivetran, a company that’s spent the past 13 years helping businesses move their data into cloud storage, is now taking a major step forward: it’s becoming a true end-to-end data movement provider.
On Thursday, the company announced it has acquired Census — a reverse ETL platform that allows businesses to move data in the opposite direction, from their cloud databases back into tools used for daily operations. Census launched in 2018 and raised over $80 million from big-name investors such as Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, and Tiger Global.
Although the financial details of the acquisition weren’t shared publicly, Census was valued at around $630 million back in 2022. Following the acquisition, the entire Census team will join Fivetran, and over time, the Census brand will be absorbed into the Fivetran platform.
George Fraser, Fivetran’s CEO and co-founder, told TechCrunch the move felt like a natural fit. He explained that customers had been asking for a reverse ETL solution for quite a while.
The company did try to build one internally — they even made a working prototype. But in the end, Fraser said it made more sense to join forces with a team that already had experience and a strong product in place.
“Reverse ETL comes with a completely different set of technical challenges,” Fraser explained. “The architecture behind it isn’t the same, and we realized it would take a lot of time and effort to get it right from scratch.”
Once they decided that an acquisition was the smarter path, Census stood out as the obvious choice. Not only did they have a good product, but both companies also shared a lot of the same customers and had a very similar approach to how they build software.
“Census and Fivetran both appeal to customers who want clean, simple, automated tools,” said Fraser. “If someone chooses us over a more complicated tool like Informatica, they’re probably also going to love Census. Our design philosophies match.”
The relationship between the two companies goes way back. Fraser met the Census founders — Boris Jabes and Anton Vaynshtok — in 2013, during Y Combinator’s winter program. At the time, Jabes and Vaynshtok were working on Meldium, a tool for managing passwords and accounts, which later got acquired by LogMeIn in 2014. Fraser and his co-founder Taylor Brown were also going through YC with their early version of Fivetran.
They all stayed in contact over the years. Fraser said they even talked about the idea behind Census long before the company was actually founded.
“It’s funny — we used to joke that this might end in an acquisition someday,” Fraser shared. “We saw how closely aligned our visions were. Honestly, this feels like it was meant to be.”
With the deal now moving forward, everything is coming together under one roof. Fivetran’s customers will soon have a seamless way to move data both into and out of cloud warehouses — a full-circle solution that the company has been moving toward for years.
