Every company in the world has engineers wasting time building admin panels and internal dashboards that nobody outside the company will ever see. David Hsu looked at that and thought: what if they just did not? Retool lets you build those tools by dragging components onto a canvas and connecting them to your database. Twenty-seven thousand companies now use it, including Amazon and DoorDash. At a $3.2 billion valuation, Retool proved that the most valuable software is often the most boring — the stuff that nobody tweets about but everybody needs.
Founded
2017
HQ
San Francisco, California
Total Raised
$445 million
Founder
David Hsu
Status
Private (valued at $3.2B as of 2023)
Website
retool.comTHE ORIGIN STORY
David Hsu was an engineer at Palantir and noticed that every company spends a huge amount of engineering time building internal tools — admin panels, dashboards, data entry forms — that are boring, repetitive, and unique to each company. He dropped out of Y Combinator's batch in 2017 to build Retool.
The insight was that 80% of internal tools look the same: a table, some forms, a few buttons connected to a database. Retool lets you build that 80% by dragging components and writing minimal code, then customize the remaining 20% with JavaScript.
WHAT THEY ACTUALLY DO
Retool lets companies build internal tools (dashboards, admin panels, CRUD apps) by dragging and dropping pre-built components and connecting them to databases and APIs. Instead of engineers spending weeks building an internal admin panel, they can build one in Retool in hours.
Pricing is per-user SaaS — free tier, Team at $10/user/month, Business and Enterprise tiers for larger organizations. Over 27,000 companies use Retool including Amazon, DoorDash, NBC, and Brex.
THE PRODUCTS
Retool (drag-and-drop internal tool builder), Retool Mobile (mobile app builder), Retool Workflows (automation), Retool Database (built-in PostgreSQL), Retool AI (AI-powered tool generation)
HOW THEY GREW
Bottom-up adoption. An engineer builds one internal tool in Retool, their team loves it, and suddenly the whole company is buying licenses.
Retool also targets startups early (generous free tier) knowing that startups grow into enterprises. They invest heavily in templates, tutorials, and documentation to reduce the time from signup to first working tool.
THE HARD PART
The "low-code" stigma. Developers historically look down on low-code tools as toys.
Retool had to convince engineers that using it was not beneath them — it was actually smart. The other challenge: once companies build enough internal tools in Retool, they become dependent on the platform.
Enterprise buyers worry about vendor lock-in. Retool has addressed this partly by releasing self-hosted options.
MONEY TRAIL
Seed (YC)
2017 · Led by
$4M raised
Series A
2019 · Led by
$20M raised
Series B
2020 · Led by
$50M raised
Series C
2021 · Led by
$120M raised
Series D
2023 · Led by
$250M raised
WHO BACKED THEM
Sequoia Capital, Elad Gil, John Collison, Nat Friedman, Y Combinator, Stripe
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