companies

Retool

The go-to low-code platform for engineers building internal admin panels, CRUD apps, and dashboards on top of existing databases and APIs, without a dedicated frontend team.

Retool was founded in 2017 by David Hsu in San Francisco after he kept rebuilding the same internal admin tools at previous jobs. The product gives engineers a drag-and-drop canvas of prebuilt components — tables, forms, charts, buttons — that bind directly to SQL databases, REST APIs, and GraphQL, cutting the weeks normally spent hand-coding a support dashboard or an ops console down to days. It came out of Y Combinator and built its early customer base among startups before landing large accounts including Amazon, DoorDash, and Brex. Retool has raised roughly $165 million total, most notably a $200 million Series C that valued the company at $3.2 billion, and has emphasized capital efficiency and profitability over further mega-rounds since. Investors include Sequoia Capital alongside well-known angels such as the Collison brothers and Elad Gil. Through 2025 the company pushed further into AI, moving Retool Agents into public beta in July and adding dynamic model routing, default multipage apps, and human-in-the-loop approval steps to its Workflows product, positioning Retool as a place to both build interfaces and run AI-driven automation on the same data layer.

Founded

2017

Headquarters

San Francisco, United States

Sector

applications