Highlights: 

  • Gradient Ventures, Y Combinator, Liquid 2 Ventures, Bragiel Brothers, and Unpopular Ventures took the lead in the funding round.
  • The company plans to use the money to hire more engineers and strengthen its engineering and growth teams

Dropbase, a collaborative data import and data management platform provider with headquarters in San Francisco, California, has raised USD 1.75 million in a pre-seed round.

Gradient Ventures, Y Combinator, Liquid 2 Ventures, Bragiel Brothers, and Unpopular Ventures took the lead in the funding round.

The company plans to use the money to hire more engineers and strengthen its engineering and growth teams, as well as to increase its customer base and advance the Dropbase Data Platform.

Dropbase is a collaborative data platform that teams can use to import, clean, and manage data from customers and partners within scalable databases that interface with their preferred analytics tools and data apps. It was founded by Jimmy Chan (CEO) and Ayazhan Zhakhan (CTO). Without any technical assistance, businesses can import, validate, manage, and query all of their data from CSV/Excel files inside fully-featured SQL databases that are designed to handle massive amounts of data.

An accidental discovery

The two founders were having a difficult time transferring the data from the spreadsheet into the SQL database so that they could work with it. Although they were tech savvy, they could not get things to function properly without a great deal of fiddling. They developed a tool that makes it simple to begin querying a Postgres database by just dragging and dropping a .csv file onto the database.

Chan describes it as a “eureka moment” for them when they recognized that if they were having difficulties doing this, many other people would also be having trouble doing it. As a result, they redirected their focus to developing Dropbase.

Chan said, “We were thinking that there should be an easier way to just do it. I just want to drag and drop a .csv file into a SQL database directly. And that’s when we came up with the name Dropbase, because you can drag it into a Postgres database, and we just give you credentials for the database, and so you would just instantly have access to that .csv file in your hosted cloud database. So that’s how we started with this”.

Jimmy Chan, the founder of Dropbase claims that once they have shown the user the difficulties, the user will be able to fix any problems that remain, after which they will load the database, at which point it will be available for querying using SQL. “The advantages of having data in a SQL database is that you can quickly query it. That’s the first thing. The second thing is that you can connect it to a downstream tool like a BI tool or another data tool in a more easy way. And you can build more historical datasets over time,” he said.

Newer improvements added to the product include the capability to host your own data and interaction with Snowflake. Dropmail is a new tool that allows users to email a .csv file to turn it into a SQL database, and Snowflake will enable customers to host their own data.