Fivetran acquires Census to become end-to-end data movement platform

After nearly 13 years in business, Fivetran will now be able to offer its customers an end-to-end data movement solution.

Fivetran, which helps enterprises move data from a variety of sources into cloud databases, announced on Thursday it has acquired Census, a reverse extract, transform, and load (ETL) platform that enables companies to transfer data out of databases and into operational tools. Census was founded in 2018 and raised more than $80 million in venture funding from such firms as Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, and Tiger Global.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Census was last valued at $630 million in 2022. Once the acquisition closes, the entire Census team will migrate over to Fivetran and the Census brand will eventually be integrated into the Fivetran platform.

George Fraser, the co-founder and CEO of Fivetran, told TechCrunch that the deal made sense for Fivetran for a lot of reasons. For one, customers have been asking Fivetran for a reverse ETL solution for years.

The company thought about developing an offering of its own, going so far as to build a prototype. But Fraser said Fivetran realized it would be a better use of resources to bring on a company that had already figured it out instead.

“Technically speaking, if you look at the code underneath [these] services, they’re actually pretty different,” Fraser said. “You have to solve a pretty different set of problems in order to do this.”

Once Fivetran decided it made more sense to add reverse ETL via an acquisition, Census was a natural choice, Fraser said, because the two companies shared many of the same customers and the two platforms are very similar stylistically.

“People who like Fivetran, as compared to Informatica or building their own connectors, they are going to be people who also like Census,” Fraser said. “The two products make broadly similar philosophical choices, and so they tend to appeal to the same customers, which is very important when you’re thinking about synergy.”

It didn’t hurt that the founding teams of Census and Fivetran go way back, either. Fraser said he met the Census team, which includes CEO Boris Jabes and co-founder Anton Vaynshtok, during Y Combinator’s 2013 winter batch.

Fraser and his co-founder, Taylor Brown, were going through the YC program while Jabes and Vaynshtok were building Meldium, a password and account management system, that was acquired by LogMeIn in 2014. They all stayed in touch and even talked about Census as a concept years before the company was founded.

Now, close to a decade later, everything is coming under one roof.

“We talked to the Census founders about their idea before they even started the company, and Taylor [Brown] and I joked at the time that it might end up in an acquisition, because there’s a lot of synergy between the two things,” Fraser said. “In some ways, this has been fated, I think.”