- Sequoia Capital led the fundraising round.
- Dylan Field, Jason Warner, Akshay Kothari, and Andreessen Horowitz also participated.
- Census aims to introduce new features such as deeper validation of data.
Census is a start-up that helps companies synchronize their consumer data from their data warehouses to their various business tools. Such as Salesforce and Marketo, today announced it has raised a Sequoia Capital-led $16 million Series A round. Other participants in this round include Andreessen Horowitz, who last year led the company’s $4.3 million seed round. Several prominent angles include Figma CEO Dylan Field, Jason Warner, GitHub CTO, Akshay Kothari, Notion COO, and Parker Conrad, CEO of Rippling.
The general idea behind the Census is to help companies in their data warehouses operationalize the data. It has historically only been used for analytics and reporting use cases. But when businesses realized that in their data centers all the information they wanted was already available. They could use that as a single source of truth without having to create additional integrations. An ecosystem of companies began to form that operationalize this information.
Census claims that it has established the resources that will make knowledge more widely useful in an enterprise. In the process, Census wants to turn a data team’s narrow position into a core feature. It helps create data products to support all parts of the business.
Census raised a total of $20 million
Census has raised $16 million in venture capital for a total of $20 million so far to meet that ambition. The round involves Andreessen Horowitz and a host of angel investors. Sequoia Capital led this round of funding. Dylan Field, Jason Warner, Akshay Kothari, John Lilly, Gokul Rajaram, Parker Conrad, and Sriram Krishnan.
The company claims that the modern data stack, with data warehouses like Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, and Snowflake at its heart, provides all of the resources a business requires to extract and turn data (like Fivetran, dbt) and then imagine it (think Looker). Tools like Census then effectively serve as a new layer that sits between the data warehouse and the business tools that can help businesses derive value from this data. Users can then conveniently synchronize their product data with a marketing tool. Such as Marketo or, for example, a CRM service such as Salesforce. Dozens of different services and data resources are already integrated with Census and its customers include Clearbit, Figma, Fivetran, LogDNA, Loom, and Notion.
Future Plans
Census aims to introduce new features such as deeper validation of data and a visual query experience using the new funding. Besides, to make Census workflows versionable and make it easier to incorporate them into an enterprise orchestration framework, it also aims to introduce code-based orchestration.
We were the first to ask three years ago, ‘Why are we dependent on a clumsy tangle of wires connecting every app when all we need is in the warehouse already?’ What if the data team could be leveraged to drive operations? ‘The possibilities are endless when the data warehouse is linked to the rest of the organization. Census explained in today’s announcement. Our emphasis when we launched was to enable product-led businesses such as Figma, Canva, and Notion to drive better marketing, sales, and consumer success. Our clients have pulled the Census into more and more situations along the way.
