Fivetran is entering a new era. After over a decade helping companies move data into cloud warehouses, the company has acquired Census—a platform that does the opposite.
With this deal, Fivetran can now support the full journey of data: from source to destination and back into operational tools. This gives users a powerful, all-in-one platform for modern data movement.
Census, founded in 2018, specializes in reverse ETL. It helps companies move data from cloud systems like Snowflake or BigQuery into tools like Salesforce, HubSpot, and Slack. The startup had raised over $80 million from major firms like Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, and Tiger Global. While financial terms weren’t shared, Census was last valued at $630 million in 2022.
The entire Census team will join Fivetran, and the brand will be gradually folded into the larger platform. For Fivetran CEO George Fraser, this move solves a long-standing request from customers.
Fraser explained that building reverse ETL from scratch would have required solving problems outside Fivetran’s core expertise. The company did create a prototype, but decided buying a specialist was smarter. Census was the obvious choice. Both platforms share similar design values and serve overlapping customers.
“People who choose Fivetran over older tools like Informatica are also the kind who pick Census,” Fraser said. “The platforms follow the same philosophy, which creates natural synergy.”
This shared mindset made the merger feel seamless. But the connection between the two companies runs even deeper. Fraser and his co-founder Taylor Brown first met Census co-founders Boris Jabes and Anton Vaynshtok during Y Combinator’s 2013 batch.
At the time, the Census team was building Meldium, a password manager later acquired by LogMeIn. They stayed in touch. Years before Census launched, they had already discussed the idea. Fraser even joked back then that the idea might lead to an acquisition one day.
That prediction has now come true. By bringing Census under its roof, Fivetran is no longer just about loading data into warehouses. It can now help companies push data back into the tools teams use every day.
The result is a unified data movement platform—one that simplifies how companies move, manage, and activate their data.
