Announcing PopSQL's $3.4M Seed Round

I'm excited to announce that PopSQL has raised a $3.4M seed round led by Gradient Ventures (Google's AI venture fund), with participation from FundersClub, Y Combinator, and many great angel investors: Max Mullen (Co-Founder Instacart), Calvin French-Owen (CTO Segment), Guillermo Rauch (CEO Vercel), Rafael Corrales (Background.vc), Chris Nguyen (Co-Founder LogDNA), Immad Akhund (CEO Mercury), Oliver Jay (Asana), Jeff Chang (Pinterest), Brianne Kimmel (worklife.vc), and others. These people have helped us every step of the way and I'm immensely grateful to them. This round of financing will help us grow the team so we can pursue our vision of creating the best tool for teams to collaborate using data.

History

I started PopSQL because I was frustrated with the existing tools on the market. My favorite SQL editor at the time was compatible with MySQL only, so I couldn't use it with our data warehouse. I was saving .sql files on my computer and copying/pasting SQL to people over Slack. When I had an insight to share, I had to export the query results to CSV, import to Google Sheets, and share the link with a coworker, but it was only a static snapshot of the data, and it was missing the actual SQL behind it. If the query or results changed, I had to repeat the entire tedious process. There had to be a better way.

So I started coding on the side while working as an engineer at Instacart and launched the initial product on Product Hunt. The results were exciting, and major companies like DoorDash, Redfin, and Shipt started to adopt the product. Next, PopSQL was accepted into Y Combinator, raised a seed round, and now, here we are.

Over the last few months, we've added a ton of value to the product:

• We improved charting: now you can create and customize charts right in PopSQL. No need to switch to Sheets to visualize your data.
• Version history: Restore your query to previous points in time if you make a mistake. Make bulk changes in your git repo and have them sync to PopSQL using our GitHub integration.
• Scheduling and alerts: Schedule your queries and dashboards to run every morning and send the results to Slack so you always have fresh data.
• Dashboards: Add multiple queries and charts to see your company metrics at a glance.
• Search: Instead of re-writing a query, search if someone else has already written it
• Query variables: Make it easy for business users to re-run your query with different variables, like user IDs or dates. Analysts can also use conditional logic using "if" statements.
• Shared connections: Make it safe and easy for teammates to access the database.
• Web application: Access PopSQL without having to download the desktop app at app.popsql.com.

What's next?

We have big plans to take PopSQL further. We want to make the SQL editor more powerful: better autocomplete, snippets, and more to give data analysts superpowers. We want to take our collaborative features further with better storytelling, comments, and data dictionaries.

We're hiring!

If you're passionate about data and want to shape the next generation of data tools, we want to hear from you! We're hiring for engineering: frontend, backend, and full stack. Check out popsql.com/about for more details.

Onwards! 🚀

Rahil
CEO, PopSQL