Prequel raised a $5.2M seed round in September 2023 led by NextView Ventures and Stage 2 Capital, with participation from Y Combinator, Script Capital, and individual investors Ravi Parikh, Adam Turner, and Ralph Gootee.

The company participated in Y Combinator and raised initial funding through the accelerator program. Total funding raised to date is $5.2M across these rounds.

Prequel provides SaaS companies with a drop-in solution for native data warehouse integrations, enabling B2B software vendors to export customer data to Snowflake, BigQuery, or other warehouses on request.

The core product has three components. First is a React SDK that creates a white-labeled setup wizard inside the vendor's application where end users can select their warehouse, input credentials, choose tables, and set sync frequency. Second is the server-side pipeline that provisions ephemeral workers to pull data from the vendor's database and push it directly into the customer's warehouse on a schedule from every 15 minutes to daily, without storing data permanently on Prequel's infrastructure.

Third is the Data Import capability launching in 2025 that works in reverse, allowing SaaS vendors to read data from customer warehouses to build analytics features or AI model training directly on customer data.

The platform supports over 20 destinations including warehouses like Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, and Databricks, plus object storage like S3 and GCS. Recent additions include support for vector and geospatial data types for AI and location-based workloads, plus Delta Lake format exports for querying of object storage data.

Deployment options range from shared cloud infrastructure to private cloud or fully self-hosted within the customer's AWS or GCP account. The system includes schema versioning, change detection, data integrity checks, and monitoring integrations with Slack, Datadog, and PagerDuty.

Prequel sells a B2B SaaS directly to software vendors that want to offer data export capabilities to their customers. Go-to-market targets developer-centric SaaS companies that need to respond quickly to customer requests for data warehouse integrations.

Pricing charges per destination rather than per row or consumption volume. For vendors, this shifts costs to a predictable, destination-based fee, reducing exposure to variable usage spikes when offering data exports as a feature.

Revenue comes primarily from monthly or annual subscriptions tied to the number of active data destinations. As vendors add customers who request data exports, each new destination represents incremental recurring revenue.

Cost structure centers on cloud infrastructure for ephemeral workers that handle data transfers, plus engineering resources to maintain connectors and add new destination types. Because Prequel does not permanently store customer data, storage costs remain minimal relative to traditional ETL providers.

Successful implementations at one SaaS vendor become reference cases for similar companies, and the technical complexity of building reliable data connectors in-house makes switching costs high once integrated.

Fivetran dominates this category with over 500 managed connectors that SaaS vendors can embed through Connect Cards or custom APIs. Fivetran's strength lies in its massive connector library and proven reliability, but the row-based pricing model can make margins challenging for vendors reselling the capability. The platform also focuses on batch-oriented syncs with 3-hour SLAs rather than near-real-time transfers.

Census offers embedded reverse-ETL with 200+ connectors through Census Connect, targeting SaaS products that need bidirectional data flows. While strong on developer experience, Census still uses consumption-based pricing and assumes the warehouse as the primary data source rather than destination.

Hightouch provides a Custom Destination toolkit for vendors to build native integrations within the Hightouch platform. This offers more flexibility than Census but requires customers to run Hightouch infrastructure or purchase separate licenses.

Airbyte leads the open-source approach with 600+ connectors and a no-code builder. Vendors can self-host to avoid per-row fees and maintain branding control, but inherit the maintenance burden and quality variability of community-contributed connectors.

Supaglue offers managed syncs through an open-source unified API for both SaaS-to-warehouse and warehouse-to-SaaS flows. While attractive for engineering-heavy teams wanting full control, it currently lacks enterprise-grade security and compliance features.

Major SaaS platforms increasingly build their own data export features rather than partnering with third-party providers. Stripe, Salesforce, and other large incumbents have rolled out native warehouse connectors, reducing the addressable market for embedded solutions among established software categories.

This trend toward vertical integration creates pressure on Prequel to focus on emerging SaaS categories and mid-market vendors who lack the engineering resources to build reliable data pipelines in-house. TAM Expansion

The 2025 launch of Data Import creates a bidirectional data platform that doubles Prequel's addressable use cases. Instead of only exporting data from SaaS applications to warehouses, vendors can now pull customer warehouse data back into their products for AI model training, in-product analytics, and warehouse-native features.

Performance enhancements like append-only mode, delta-table writes, and partition tuning push the platform upmarket to handle larger data volumes and near-real-time requirements that legacy ETL providers struggle with. This opens data-intensive verticals like fintech, observability, and IoT platforms.

Developer tooling additions including GitHub Actions and versioned APIs position Prequel within CI/CD workflows, creating potential expansion into DevOps budgets as teams treat data contracts as code.

Enterprise security features including SOC 2 Type II compliance, SSH tunneling, and key-pair authentication have already attracted regulated customers like Modern Treasury. Continued hardening through self-hosting options opens heavily regulated segments in healthcare and EU financial services that traditionally built connectors in-house.

Early traction with developer-focused SaaS companies like LogRocket, Metronome, and Postscript provides reference customers to penetrate the long tail of product-led startups. Tens of thousands of these companies currently rely on third-party ETL tools and represent significant expansion opportunity.

The shift toward warehouse-native applications creates new customer categories beyond traditional SaaS, including AI platforms, data apps, and analytics tools that need seamless integration with customer data infrastructure.

European demand for warehouse-native exports driven by the EU Data Act and GDPR requirements makes Prequel's zero-data-persistence model attractive for compliance. Adding regional hosting and data residency controls could unlock EMEA SaaS vendors without heavy localization investment.

APAC markets show strong growth in Snowflake, BigQuery, and Databricks adoption, providing ready destinations for Prequel integrations. Localizing documentation and adding data residency features would extend reach across Japan, Singapore, and Australia without requiring field sales buildout.

API complexity: While Prequel aims to avoid API-based integration challenges, the platform still depends on maintaining reliable connections to 20+ different warehouse and storage systems. Changes to destination APIs, authentication methods, or data formats could create maintenance overhead and reliability issues that undermine product value.

Vertical integration: Large SaaS incumbents are building native data export features rather than partnering with third-party providers. As more established software categories develop in-house warehouse connectors, Prequel's addressable market shrinks to newer SaaS segments and mid-market vendors, potentially limiting long-term growth.

Pricing pressure: The shift from consumption-based to per-destination pricing benefits Prequel today but may face pressure as the market matures. Competitors could adopt similar pricing models while leveraging greater scale to offer lower per-destination costs, forcing Prequel to compete primarily on price rather than technical differentiation.