Why I'm betting $100M in venture capital on the CSV

This morning we announced $50m in Series B funding led by John Curtius at Tiger Global Management, an unequivocal recognition of the hard work this team has poured into our product and our customers. In any market, this is a feat of growth. In this new economic environment, where the bar has heightened significantly for access to capital, I am filled with a truly humbling sense of gratefulness.

We do not take this vote of confidence for granted, especially the support of our existing investors doubling down on this vision: Scale Venture Partners, Two Sigma Ventures, Afore Capital, Gradient Ventures, Two Sigma Ventures, and Workday Ventures.

This company that Eric and I founded three years ago was built out of our personal frustration with the status quo. We had been forced, time and time again, to solve the data onboarding problem at different companies along our journey.

Some express their pain through music, others through art. At Flatfile, we expressed ours through a product.

Speaking with a reporter early in our journey, I went off script and explained how Flatfile was born during a long weekend of “rage designing”. This became the headline, and ever since then, this concept has become core to our ethos at Flatfile. Data exchange might be a boring problem to some, but for the team we’ve built at Flatfile this is a problem we own to our core.

Decades ago, Gordon Moore, the founder of Intel, predicted that the number of components in integrated circuits would double every couple of years. This became known as “Moore’s law.” For nearly half a century, it’s guided the semiconductor industry, which is responsible for every technological computing innovation, from the PC, to smart watches, to self-driving cars.  

But what has always fascinated me about Moore’s law isn’t so much Gordon Moore’s incredible foresight. It’s that all of these innovations that we take for granted hinged on solving one small specific technological problem: the distance between transistors on a chip.

Hardware is built on silicon. Software is built on data. The key to unlocking and unblocking the coming decades of innovation hinges on the speed, ease, and accuracy of data exchange — the new Moore’s law.

At Flatfile, we created a new category with data onboarding, and have grown rapidly by powering the data import experiences for 500 customers including some of the largest SaaS companies in the world. We now employ a team of nearly 100 people who work to support the thousands of developers on our platform, and with this funding we’re broadening our horizon to be able to support nearly every exchange of data in the world. 

I can’t wait for what’s next.

David