Airtable融资1亿美元，估值11亿，让电子表格也能开发应用

做的是什么生意

Airtable sells a cloud platform that looks like a spreadsheet but acts like a database, letting people without coding skills organize data and assemble apps and workflows; its Blocks system pulls in data from many sources and pushes it to outputs such as marketing campaigns, bots or VR experiences.

启动资金：$170 million raised by November 2018, including a $52M round in March 2018 and this $100M Series C led by Thrive Capital, Benchmark and Coatue Management.

起因

Howie Liu, Emmett Nicholas and Andrew Ofstad co-founded Airtable out of their own frustration: the tools for building apps were too expensive and complicated for the many knowledge workers who do not code. Their answer was a database customized to whatever each user needs rather than a fixed model built by someone else.

经过

Airtable grew from 30,000 customers in March 2018, when it raised $52M and launched Blocks, to 80,000 businesses by November 2018. On November 15, 2018 it closed a $100M Series C at a $1.1B valuation led by Josh Kushner's Thrive Capital, Peter Fenton's Benchmark and Philippe and Thomas Laffont's Coatue Management, with Delphine Arnault, Emily Weiss, Alexa Von Tobel and prior investors CRV and Caffeinated Capital participating. The company said it would use the money to hire and open offices outside the US.

结果

The Series C closed at a $1.1B valuation, bringing Airtable's total funding to $170M, with 80,000 businesses on the platform at the time of the round; the company stayed live and used the money to hire talent and expand outside the US.

可借鉴之处

将强大软件隐藏在用户熟悉的界面下：Airtable的电子表格前端使一个灵活的数据库能被8万家企业使用，这些企业可能永远不会用传统应用工具。