Airbyte, an open source data integration platform, has acquired Grouparoo, an open source startup that helps businesses sync data between data warehouses and cloud-based applications. This compliments Airbyte’s product in many respects, as Airbyte concentrates on loading data into data warehouses, whereas Grouparoo focuses on operationalizing that data.
“It’s an open source reverse ETL [extract, transform, load] company,” Airbyte co-founder and CEO Michel Tricot said. “They focus exactly on the other direction [from Airbyte]. They have a very strong technical team and they’ve already built a part of the product and it’s going to be about how we can leverage everything that they’ve done and get them into the team to expand the Airbyte product for reverse ETL.”
Aribyte isn’t so much buying the product as it is the team’s knowledge, according to Tricot. He stated, “We are not integrating their technology.” “It’s more about their knowledge and experience,” says the author. Tricot also mentioned that the Grouparoo team has always focused on making its service accessible to a non-technical audience, which is something Airbyte has also been focused on for a long time (though it also offers a command-line tool for technical users that want more flexibility, too). He expressed his expectation that the team can assist Airbyte in developing UI tools for establishing the connections it requires to connect to more third-party services. Brian Leonard, Grouparoo’s CEO and co-founder, used a more sober tone in his announcement today.
“Thank you to our users and investors for your continued support,” he wrote. “Grouparoo certainly had a set of early believers and users that saw what we were trying to accomplish. They deployed Grouparoo in their infrastructure or on our cloud, and some even built their own plugins to extend the platform. When we really took a hard look at it, though, we were not on the right path to have the impact that we wanted to have in the world.”
He did say, though, that he feels Airbyte is on the correct track, in part because, in order to operationalize data, practically every organisation today must extract and load data into their warehouses.
