Fivetran Acquires Census: Expanding Data Movement Capabilities

Fivetran Expands Capabilities with Census Acquisition

Following almost 13 years of operation, Fivetran is positioned to deliver a complete data movement solution to its clientele.

Fivetran, a company specializing in data transfer from diverse sources to cloud databases, announced on Thursday the acquisition of Census. Census is a reverse ETL (extract, transform, and load) platform, facilitating the movement of data from databases into operational applications.

About Census

Founded in 2018, Census secured over $80 million in venture capital funding from prominent investors including Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, and Tiger Global.

While the financial details of the acquisition remain undisclosed, Census was most recently valued at $630 million in 2022. Upon completion of the acquisition, the entire Census team will join Fivetran, and the Census brand will ultimately be integrated into the Fivetran platform.

Strategic Rationale for the Acquisition

George Fraser, co-founder and CEO of Fivetran, explained to TechCrunch that the acquisition aligned with Fivetran’s strategic objectives for several reasons.

Notably, Fivetran’s customers had consistently requested a reverse ETL solution. The company initially considered independent development, even creating a prototype.

However, Fraser stated that Fivetran determined it would be more efficient to integrate a company that had already successfully addressed the challenges of reverse ETL.

Technical Considerations

“From a technical standpoint, the underlying codebases of these services are quite distinct,” Fraser noted. “Addressing the problems inherent in reverse ETL requires a fundamentally different approach.”

Once the decision was made to pursue reverse ETL through acquisition, Census emerged as the logical choice, due to overlapping customer bases and stylistic similarities between the two platforms.

“Users who favor Fivetran over alternatives like Informatica or custom connector development are likely to also appreciate Census,” Fraser said. “Both products share similar design philosophies and therefore attract a comparable customer base, which is crucial for realizing synergy.”

Long-Standing Relationship

The close relationship between the founding teams of Census and Fivetran also played a role in the acquisition.

Fraser recounted meeting the Census team, including CEO Boris Jabes and co-founder Anton Vaynshtok, during the winter 2013 batch of Y Combinator.

Fraser and his co-founder, Taylor Brown, were participating in the YC program while Jabes and Vaynshtok were developing Meldium, a password and account management system, which was later acquired by LogMeIn in 2014. They maintained contact and even discussed the concept of Census years before its inception.

A Foreseen Outcome

Now, nearly a decade later, the two companies are uniting under one umbrella.

“We discussed the Census founders’ idea even before the company was established, and Taylor [Brown] and I playfully suggested it might lead to an acquisition, recognizing the inherent synergy between the two concepts,” Fraser said. “In many ways, this outcome feels predetermined.”