As the name suggests it is about building tools for companies. In a way the company is retooling lot of companies because they are doing it 10x faster to build the same stuff others would do without needing code.
A startup from San Francisco, starting in 2017, the company’s founders while building a Google pay for the UK realized that they were spending lot of time building these internal applications to manage their own workflows. Then they came up with the ideas, which is like the Lego blocks, where you still need some technical knowledge but engineers who use Retool can use these blocks and don’t have to build everything from scratch.
This for companies saves time and resources and leaves them with more time to focus on other areas, said Sid Puri, head of India, Retool.
“We work with some of the top companies in the US and in India with the unicorns in India like Swiggy, Sharechat et. In India it is too early for us and our customer base is startups, who want to build stuff quickly with less engineers. We never had problems of funding. Our last valuation was $ 3.2 billion. We make revenue,” said Puri.
Last year, Retool launched free tier, a new free plan, which allowed companies to use Retool for free. “Recently, we launched a $25,000 in credits for companies which are eligible. We want to support young startups and want to give them Retool for free for one year. We understand, from our own journey, that these startups do not have the funding to pay for such tools and hence we want to support them. I’m trying to grow Retool in the Indian eco-system right now.
This is going to be the game changer for the industry. In fact there are lot of companies are copying us,” added Puri.
With over 6 million software developers, the company sees India as a critical market with a thriving startup ecosystem. Just in 2021, Indian startups raised $42 billion making it one of the fastest-growing technology centers of the world.
Puri said that in today’s ecosystem, speed of development holds a key competitive advantage, and Retool sees more Indian companies adopting the platform to enable this growth.
With the hyper-growth of Indian startups and the scale of the problems they need to solve, we see more users and broad adoption of new technologies. Startups here are always looking for new ways to solve problems, and with the fast growth of their workforce they tend to have a lot of operationally intensive use cases with large back office operation teams.
The company has established a strong presence in the US with notable customers such as Amazon, Pinterest, and Coinbase.
Retool also integrates natively with dozens of data sources and can connect to anything via REST or GraphQL API, said its India head.