Retool doubles down on India, their fastest growing foreign market

Retool, a San Francisco-based company that enables developers to build software applications for internal use cases, today announced a new, more extensive free tier that is exclusive to the Indian market. The company, a graduate of YCombinator in 2017, was recently valued at $1.85 billion and has established a strong presence in the US with notable customers such as Amazon, Pinterest, and Coinbase.

Retool aims to change how software is built, and they believe supporting Indian entrepreneurs and developers is critical to this mission. With over 6 million developers, India is home to one of the largest and fastest-growing startup ecosystems globally, and the company wants to help independent developers and teams build software much faster. India is already the company’s fastest-growing foreign market, with local organisations such as CRED, Coinswitch, Sharechat, and Unacademy using Retool in their daily operations.

“The growth in India cannot be ignored. Last year was a great year for Indian unicorns and IPOs, including many of our own Retool customers. We see Retool helping enable even more growth for Indian developers and the startup ecosystem,” said David Hsu, Co-founder and CEO of Retool.

Retool recently announced a $20 million Series C funding round including investment from Sequoia Capital, Elad Gil, the CEO of GitHub, and the Stripe co-founders. The company offers a platform that helps developers build any internal application ten times faster than building from scratch. Developers can compose any app interface using drag and drop, while also using code to customise backend data-fetching and logic. Retool also integrates natively with dozens of data sources and can connect to anything via REST or GraphQL API. All together, Retool reduces the boilerplate code a developer has to write near to zero, giving them more time to build better interfaces and write business logic.

Given the immense potential within India’s startup scene, Retool is introducing a free tier that allows developers to build more apps and share them with more teammates upfront. The new free tier includes 100 blocks—where each component, query, or transformation counts as a block—which can be used to create around 5 applications to use and share for free. The company believes this new free tier will reduce friction and broaden accessibility to India-based startups and independent developers.

“Software has the power to transform industries, but it is still expensive to plan, build, and maintain,” shared Hsu. “We want to make internal software faster, cheaper, and more enjoyable to build. We’ve seen incredible momentum with our Indian customer base and feel it’s the right time to expand our support and footprint in the region.”

“2021 was a breakthrough year for Indian startups. Record breaking funding rounds are leading to more companies in hyper-growth and more competition to hire the best Indian engineers,” said Sid Puri, Head of India at Retool. “We believe empowering great engineers to build faster, benefits everyone—engineers get to focus on the most important work and companies can make the most of their engineering teams as they grow. We’re excited to make our platform more accessible in India and hire across engineering, support, and success for our Bangalore base.”

Retool believes they are just getting started in India, with more announcements slated to come in 2022. The company has a mission to change how software is built, and is hiring across several roles.

For press inquiries, please contact michael@retool.com

About Retool

Retool is the fast way to build internal tools. Visually design apps that interface with any database or API. Switch to code nearly anywhere to customise how your apps look and work. With Retool, you ship more apps and move your business forward—all in less time.

Thousands of teams at companies like Amazon, DoorDash, Peloton, and Brex collaborate around custom-built Retool apps to solve internal workflows. To learn more, visit retool.com.