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What is the size of the market for data integration, and how is Census positioning itself for potential growth in the future?

Sean Lynch

Co-founder & CPO at Census

When we started, it was very much a focus on product-led growth. Obviously, that has seen its own wave that we've ridden. We've had a lot of those customers grow over the pandemic and we've been able to grow with them, which has been fantastic. It's worked out really well for us. But that's not our TAM.

For us, in terms of target customers, we really think any company that is generating data is a potential target customer. That includes a lot of companies that are not necessarily on the modern data stack at this point. In terms of staging, we started with these early-stage product-led growth companies that were already early adopters of the modern data stack, so there was high alignment there. Now we're expanding to a larger set of people who are still building on loosely a data stack type of model. That's e-commerce companies, marketplaces, and certainly more interesting and less traditional companies as well -- a little bit more fintech or, just generally speaking, finance, where they still have large data sets. It's maybe less the "modern data stack" and instead just "data stack."

Beyond that, the longer-term category is people who are not necessarily on a data stack yet. We think the hub-and-spoke model that we described earlier is still the right view for them. When we talk about TAM there, the space of all integration services -- and this was maybe two years ago -- was about $30 billion. I think that is probably underselling it, just in terms of the proliferation of SaaS now and especially over the last couple of years, and watching the number of early-stage companies that are building really sophisticated business and operations on top of no-code types of tools.

I think that is the future. I continue to be humbled by how much SaaS exists in the world and how much demand there is for SaaS for various workflows. It doesn't seem like we are at all moving towards a consolidation at this point. It seems like the path forward is for companies to have their various point solutions work better and better together. From an integration standpoint, even just building this company, we've been like, "Wow, there's a half dozen other spinoffs that we could potentially build that are purely around how to make software integrate better with each other." There's still so much to do in that space. So that $30 billion number is the type of Forrester number that we can throw around as part of an investor deck, but I think that the space is still very, very early days.

Find this answer in Sean Lynch, co-founder of Census, on reverse ETL's role in the modern data stack
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