Fivetran takes census and becomes an end-to-end data movement platform

After nearly 13 years of business, Fivetran is able to provide end-to-end data movement solutions to its customers.

Fivetran, which helps businesses move data from various sources to cloud databases, announced Thursday it has acquired Census, a back-extract, conversion and load (ETL) platform that allows businesses to transfer data from the database to manipulation tools. The Census was founded in 2018 and raised more than $80 million in venture capital from companies such as Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz and Tiger Global.

The terms of the transaction were not disclosed, but the census was last valued at $630 million in 2022. Once the acquisition is over, the entire census team will move to Fivetran, and the census brand will eventually be integrated into the Fivetran platform.

George Fraser, co-founder and CEO of Fivetran, told TechCrunch that the deal makes sense for Fivetran for a number of reasons. For one, customers have been seeking Fivetran for reverse ETL solutions for years.

The company thought about developing its own offering and building a prototype. However, Fraser said Fivetran has found it to use its resources better instead to attract companies that already understood it.

“Technically speaking, if you look at the code below, [these] The service is actually quite different,” Fraser said. “To do this, you have to solve a rather different set of problems.”

Determining Fivetran would make more sense to add Reverse ETL via acquisition, the census was a natural choice, Fraser said. Because both companies share many of the same customers and the two platforms are very stylistically similar.

“People who like Fivetran will likely be people who like census compared to Informatica and building their own connectors,” Fraser says. “The two products tend to appeal to the same customers because they make very similar philosophical choices. This is very important when thinking about synergy.”

The Census and the Founderan founding team did not hurt the return either. Fraser said he met a census team that included CEO Boris Javes and co-founder Anton Weinstok during the 2013 winter batch of Y Combinators.

Fraser and his co-founder Taylor Brown went through the YC program, with Jabes and Vaynshtok building Meldium, a password and account management system obtained by Logmein in 2014.

Now, nearly a decade later, everything is coming under one roof.

“We spoke to the founders of the census about their ideas before they started the company. [Brown] And I joked that it might end up in an acquisition because there’s a lot of synergy between the two things,” Fraser said.