Michel Tricot On Raising $185 Million To Build An Open-Source Data Integration Platform To Move Data From Various Sources Into Data Warehouses, Data Lakes, And Databases

Some founders dream of billion-dollar outcomes. Others quietly stack experiences, industry by industry and skill by skill, until their time arrives. Michel Tricot is the latter.

Before co-founding Airbyte and raising $185M, Michel helped build two companies that sold for $300M and $115M, respectively. His venture, Airbyte raised funding from top-tier investors like Altimeter Capital, Coatue, Benchmark, and Accel.

In this episode, you will learn:

• Michel’s decade-long experience across multiple startups, culminating in $415M worth of exits, prepared him to build Airbyte with deep operational and technical insight.
• He learned that founders should explore markets they truly understand. His success with Airbyte came from staying rooted in his expertise: large-scale data systems.
• At LiveRamp, rideOS, and Airbyte, Michel proved that small groups of motivated, mission-aligned people can outperform larger organizations by focusing on clarity and ownership.
• Michel distinguishes between community traction and monetizable demand, understanding that open-source success (project-market fit) must evolve into business value (product-market fit).
• Airbyte’s growth accelerated when it offered enterprises full control over their data, solving one of the most pressing privacy and compliance concerns in the AI era.
• Raising $185M didn’t mean scaling recklessly. Michel emphasizes experimentation hygiene, investor alignment, and measured growth before expanding aggressively.
• From hacking as a teen to building data platforms, Michel’s story shows that curiosity, humility, and relentless learning are the real superpowers behind sustainable entrepreneurship.

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About Michel Tricot:

Michel Tricot is the co-founder and CEO @ Airbyte. He has been working in data engineering for the past 15 years. As head of integrations and engineering director at Liveramp (NYSE: RAMP), he grew the team responsible for building and scaling the data ingestion and data distribution connectors, syncing 100s TB every day.

In 2020, Michel co-founded Airbyte, the new open-source data integration platform, with the vision to commoditize data integration pipelines across all industries and organizations.

After just 1 year, Airbyte grew a community with more than 6k members, got deployed over 16k times and raised over 180M from Accel, Altimeter, Benchmark, Coatue and YC.

Connect with Michel Tricot:

• Twitter
• Crunchbase
• LinkedIn
• RocketReach

Read the Full Transcription of the Interview:

Alejandro Cremades: All righty, hello everyone, and welcome to The DealMaker Show. Well, today we have an amazing guest, and I hope that you’re all ready for the battle of accents. So it’s gonna be quite fun, and quite an inspiring conversation. We’re gonna be talking about the building, the scaling, the financing, and the exiting.

Alejandro Cremades: He’s also been part of two acquisitions — companies that he was at, one for $300 million and another for $115 million. And now, he’s raised $185 million for his current company, doing something really interesting — especially in that transition from project-market fit to product-market fit. I think you’re all going to really enjoy what our guest has to say. So without further ado, let’s welcome our guest today, Michel Tricot. Welcome to the show.

Michel Tricot: Hi everyone. Thank you, Alejandro, for having me.

Alejandro Cremades: So, born in Switzerland — give us a walk through memory lane. How was life growing up in Switzerland and all the above?

Michel Tricot: Yeah, Switzerland — I mean, obviously, I’m very biased by my childhood memories. It’s an amazing country, beautiful, and very close to the mountains. So I was put on skis very early in my life. I love skiing, yeah.

Alejandro Cremades: And you moved quite a bit too. Going to Strasbourg from Switzerland and then Paris — I wonder, moving like that, what kind of perspective opened up early on for you?

Michel Tricot: I think you get less attached to locations and more to the people around you. And as you move, it also means you have to leave some friends in your original country. I think it reinforces your relationship with your family. Strasbourg was a great time — it’s a beautiful city. And Paris, amazing as well.

Alejandro Cremades: Amazing, for sure. Now, computer science — how did you get into the whole computer thing?

Michel Tricot: That’s a very good question. When I was in Switzerland, actually, very good friends of my parents had this big room full of computers. I would spend all my weekends with them — I didn’t have a computer at the time. I was just playing Prince of Persia, Tetris, and hacking around a few things.

Michel Tricot: Later on, in Strasbourg, I got my first computer from someone who was getting rid of it — it was a 386 or something like that. That’s when I started to really dive deeper.

Michel Tricot: When I was at the end of middle school in France, you could work on farms. So I went to work on a farm, harvesting tobacco, and that’s how I bought my first computer. In the beginning, a little bit of programming, a little bit of hacking, etc. That was my initial journey into it.

Michel Tricot: At the end of high school, I had to decide: do I want to go for the human machinery — the medical field — or the silicon machinery — computer science? I went for CS.

Alejandro Cremades: And you eventually came here to the U.S. too — at Princeton — working there and understanding the brain, of all things. How was that? The American dream and all that good stuff?

Michel Tricot: At the end of your master’s in most French engineering schools, you have to go work for a company or do an internship for about six months. I was very fortunate that Siemens had a program where they brought in international interns to work with researchers from Princeton.

Michel Tricot: She was working on computer vision algorithms for segmenting the brain — all part of a product we sold to hospitals and brain surgeons. It helped detect what part of the brain was where, what it looked like, what its shape was. With specific modalities, you could even see disease appearing on the brain.

Michel Tricot: That was a very fun moment. The American dream — I still remember the first time I landed in New York: big buildings, very wide roads, lots of lights.

Alejandro Cremades: I hear you, man. That’s shocking. I still remember that same feeling — it’s quite something. Now, for you, quite heartbreaking — the whole visa nonsense you had to deal with.

Michel Tricot: I don’t know if I’d call it nonsense. For me, it’s more like a filter — looking for motivated people. But yes, indeed, I had to go back to Paris mid-2008.

Michel Tricot: Actually, that turned out to be a bad that became very good, because it was my first experience in the manufacturing of data. I was at a company called FactSet — also a U.S. company — doing back and forth between New York and Paris. That’s when I learned the fundamentals of what it means to collect data at scale, prepare it, and make it actionable for the end user.

Michel Tricot: Here, it was traders and quantitative analysts. That was a very, very good experience.

Alejandro Cremades: So how do you go from that to landing back in San Francisco and joining as one of the early employees at LiveRamp? Quite the transition there.

Michel Tricot: Yeah. I always wanted to go back to the U.S. I also wanted to be in San Francisco, in the Bay Area — this is really where a lot of tech happens and where the talent goes.

Michel Tricot: In December 31st, 2010, I was with my now-wife and we said, “Okay, we’re going to change something in our life. We’re going to get married, etc., and cherry on the cake, we’re also going to move to the U.S. — San Francisco.”

Michel Tricot: So I called a few college friends — we had a very strong group that did all our school projects together. One of them had just joined LiveRamp — at the time it was called RapLeaf. He said, “Yeah, let’s see if that works.” Visas were a bit easier then, and I got one.

Michel Tricot: In October 2011, I landed in San Francisco with three suitcases. That was the beginning of the journey.

Alejandro Cremades: How many employees were at LiveRamp when you joined?

Michel Tricot: Between 25 and 30 people. They had an initial product, a reactive product, but internally they had started to pivot into ad tech — moving data between advertising platforms to better target users online.

Michel Tricot: We weren’t doing anything advertising-related ourselves, but we were moving all these pieces of information so that the ads and content users saw online were well-suited to their audience.

Michel Tricot: When you’re in ad tech, you’re operating at internet scale — so many websites, so many calls, processing petabytes of data. To me, that was moving from the manufacturing of data to managing very, very large-scale data systems.

Alejandro Cremades: I mean, 20 or so employees definitely gives you a glimpse of the ingredients that made the company a success — because it ended up being acquired for over $300 million. Looking back, what would you say were the top three things that made that company the success it became?

Michel Tricot: The first thing would definitely be right place, right time. That was really the explosion of mobile. The internet had started earlier, but that’s when it became completely widespread.

Michel Tricot: There was this new business model around free content — but on the other side, you had to watch some ads. We were there at the right time.

Michel Tricot: The second thing: with a small team of very capable and driven humans, you can do a lot. That’s something I’ve always kept with me — humans make the difference in the company you’re building. If you have motivated, smart people who understand where the company is going, they can do marvelous things.

Michel Tricot: The last one was about giving and making bets on people. We always talk about experience versus capabilities, and LiveRamp was a very good school of life — they took a lot of young people and gave them a chance to do ambitious things: managing teams, managing organizations.

Michel Tricot: So many people who came out of LiveRamp went on to start companies. It created a very strong foundation for people to build the businesses of today and tomorrow. Those are the three things I try to reproduce myself.

Alejandro Cremades: So right after that — another company, another acquisition, right? That one was acquired for over $150 million, and it sounds like on this one you were a little bit earlier. It seems in your journey you’ve gotten earlier and earlier — all the way to becoming a founder now with Airbyte, which we’ll talk about in a bit.

Alejandro Cremades: How did that journey go, going from LiveRamp to deciding, “Okay, I want to be earlier in this next chapter”? And how did you come across RideOS?

Michel Tricot: The interesting thing is, I always told myself that after LiveRamp, I would start a company. As I was thinking of leaving, one of my very good friends in San Francisco told me, “Hey Michel, there’s this small team from Uber starting a new business around self-driving cars — making them more autonomous, faster, and getting them on the road faster. Are you interested in joining?”

Michel Tricot: I said, “Yeah, sounds interesting, let’s do it.”

Michel Tricot: For the first six months, there were so many things to build. We had also signed a very big deal with one of the key car manufacturers in the U.S.

Michel Tricot: After six months, I told the CEO my ambition was to become a founder. The CEO said, “Okay, Michel, sounds very good. We’re going to work together on acquiring the skills you might not have gotten from LiveRamp or your six months here.”

Michel Tricot: The two of us traveled around the world — China, Japan, Germany, France, etc. It was always about building partnerships, fundraising, etc. That was basically hitting all the walls possible.

Michel Tricot: That was a very strong learning I’ve applied since then. I got the opportunity within RideOS to continue on the technical side — working on making data actionable for end users — but at the same time, learning what it means to build and start a business.

Michel Tricot: Same recipe: a very strong team and lots of opportunities for learning outside your domain of expertise. That was very, very valuable.

Alejandro Cremades: So then the acquisition happens — but at what point did you say, “I think it’s time for me to go at it,” and that Airbyte was the one you were going to start?

Michel Tricot: It happened around March 2019. I started feeling like I wanted to use my time to build something of my own. I told the CEO I was ready to make the jump.

Michel Tricot: I stayed there for another two and a half months, and in July 2019 I told them, “Yeah, I’m going to do it.” I took about a month just to rest and think about what I wanted to do next — because after about six years at LiveRamp and then jumping directly to RideOS, the level of intensity over almost 10 years was pretty high. I needed some time to just reflect.

Michel Tricot: And yeah, end of August, starting to brainstorm on ideas. Initially, I was working with some people that were also from LiveRamp at the time, but I also started to work with my now co-founder. And, you know, I told him, “Oh, you don’t have to join.” He was telling me, “Maybe I don’t want to do a startup anymore.”

Michel Tricot: And I said, “Okay, you don’t have to join. Let’s just brainstorm together.” So we started doing a lot of brainstorming, and by November we really settled down on, “Yes, let’s continue in the data field.”

Michel Tricot: We explored so many ideas at the time. We applied to YC, and in January 2020 we incorporated the company and started YC. That’s been the beginning of the journey.

Alejandro Cremades: So I guess for the people that are listening to get it, what ended up being Airbyte?

Michel Tricot: Yeah. So initially, it was a very different product. COVID had its play in us pivoting the company a few times at the beginning of 2020.

Michel Tricot: But Airbyte, the way it is today, is what we call a data movement platform — meaning that we have the ability to connect to any system, extract data from these systems, and make it available in downstream systems. The goal is what we like to call “making data available.” So, pulling data from systems and making it actionable — sending it to places where it delivers value.

Michel Tricot: Initially, we were very focused on analytics — putting more data into data warehouses. Over the past year and a half, we’ve also been very involved in bringing more data and building context for agency systems.

Michel Tricot: And it’s open source, meaning that we have a ton of users in our community who are both users and contributors to the project.

Alejandro Cremades: I know that at the beginning you guys spent quite a bit of time on user discovery. How much grind was that?

Michel Tricot: That’s where COVID actually helped us. Everyone was bored at home during COVID. So what we had was a lot of automation on LinkedIn, trying to get in touch with very specific roles and titles. At the time, we were targeting data engineers, data directors, and similar profiles.

Michel Tricot: We would go on Zoom with them, spend 15 to 30 minutes just trying to understand the pains they were still experiencing day to day — having five different tools, buying a tool but still needing to rebuild the same thing on the side, etc.

Michel Tricot: We did about — I should even look — we have a Google Drive with all our notes, probably 200 to 250 calls. Just conversations narrowing down where we wanted to go.

Michel Tricot: And yeah, it’s something we’ve kept as part of the culture. Having a community really helps. We always ask our users what their main pain point is today, and what would be a “magic wand” solution for them to solve their problems. We always incorporate that feedback into the product.

Alejandro Cremades: And as you’re saying, “our users,” what happens when your open-source project completely takes off?

Michel Tricot: Good question. Well, when you have a small and mighty team, it’s easy to get completely swamped by all the community interaction — which is very good.

Michel Tricot: But at the same time, it also means you’re spending so much time with the community that you don’t have time anymore to build and continue focusing on the product. That’s when we went to build up more of the company.

Michel Tricot: That’s also when we raised the Series B. But that was a very strong signal for us. The product was still a little bit immature, but people were going above and beyond to make it work for their use case — because the pain we were solving was so acute that anything was better than what they were doing.

Michel Tricot: That’s really how we got that interest from the community and from our users. But yes, it’s very painful when you hit the wall of not being able to work on your product.

Alejandro Cremades: Yeah, no kidding. And talking about that too — just to double-click on it — there are a lot of people who talk about product-market fit, but before that, there’s project-market fit. Walk us through both — when you hit each, and how it looked when you transitioned from project-market fit to product-market fit.

Michel Tricot: Yeah. Project-market fit, I would say, applies especially in open source — when you have a project that resonates with an audience of users who just download your software and start using it.

Michel Tricot: There’s no real expectation, but suddenly things completely grow and explode. Yet, you still haven’t found what the monetization story is behind it. To me, it’s like dividing product-market fit into two steps: project-market fit and product-market fit.

Michel Tricot: The monetization piece is a very different story, because expectations change, and you need to be intentional about what use case you want to serve.

Michel Tricot: In open source, you don’t know how people are using your product. We initially built it for people to put more data into warehouses, but some used it for cache hydration or other use cases that didn’t really fit our monetization roadmap — though they still used it that way.

Michel Tricot: For us, it was about narrowing down the number of use cases. That’s where we had to build a lot more in terms of support and understanding the exact value people wanted.

Michel Tricot: With Airbyte, we do a lot around control over your data. Data is very sensitive today — even more in the age of AI. We really hit a nerve in the market when we said Airbyte can connect to every system, even the most sensitive ones, without ever giving any information to a third party.

Michel Tricot: That’s our sovereignty feature and value proposition — you can deploy Airbyte on your infrastructure. We never see what you’re doing. At that point, it exploded within organizations because people could move any data easily through a simple platform, removing all the pain of building different pipelines.

Michel Tricot: But it wasn’t obvious to us at first that this would be a main use case for why people were using Airbyte open source.

Alejandro Cremades: To that point, there are probably people listening who are still early in building their businesses, wondering whether they have product-market fit or not. Obviously, if you’re wondering, most likely you don’t.

But in your case, when you really hit product-market fit, what did that look like? What did that feel like?

Michel Tricot: Especially early in your journey, your product will have deficiencies — there’s no way to build a perfect product. If you’re building a perfect product, you’re not moving fast enough.

Michel Tricot: For me, product-market fit is when people go above and beyond. They accept that some pieces are missing, but the pain you’re solving is so acute that they’re willing to overlook it — or be fine if those things are fixed a year or two later.

Michel Tricot: That’s what product and even project-market fit mean: the problem you’re solving is so acute that users will do anything to use your solution.

Michel Tricot: And it pulls you — it’s almost like the customer is fueling the energy. You don’t have to fuel it yourself.

Alejandro Cremades: That’s unbelievable. Now, you guys have raised $185 million. As you mentioned, there have been several events — YC, the Seed, Series A, Series B. What has that journey been like raising the money, and what has the experience been like moving from one financing cycle to the next?

Michel Tricot: I’d say because almost everything was done over the same year, there was very little logistics — more like updates, rather than starting from scratch and creating a new data room, etc.

Michel Tricot: The data room was already there. Some numbers had changed, but overall the business was still similar to what it had been a few months before. That made everything much simpler.

Michel Tricot: The thing that happens when you raise that much money so early is: how do you create discipline internally so people don’t suddenly feel like, “Oh, wow, we have so much money — let’s spend it”?

Michel Tricot: No — there are still a lot of things to prove before scaling. So it’s about creating good hygiene around experimentation, and then committing when something works. I’d say that was probably the biggest challenge of raising so much money so early in the company’s life.

Michel Tricot: And after that, because of the stage we were at, picking and finding the right investors was very important.

Michel Tricot: We needed investors who really understand the motion of open source. As I said, you have project-market fit and product-market fit.

Michel Tricot: Project-market fit, in a way, is about building a very wide user base — setting a standard for what it means to move data. Yes, you can monetize at the same time, but you have to focus on that broad user base because maybe 10–20% become your customers.

Michel Tricot: You need to build that base — otherwise, you might as well not do open source at all, because open source is costly in time, product development, etc.

Alejandro Cremades: Now you’ve got all these investors betting on you — customers, employees, everyone believing in the future you’re building. If you went to sleep tonight and woke up in a world where Airbyte’s vision is fully realized, what does that future look like?

Michel Tricot: You’d have an automated way of mining the data gold in your organization. Accessing data should be a no-brainer. Today, it requires large teams to manage and integrate it.

Michel Tricot: I just want an agent to move through an organization, discovering, “Oh, you’re using this tool,” “You’re using that database,” and be able to autonomously decide what data to pick, move, and integrate into its processing.

Michel Tricot: Basically, scaling how you make data actionable — without humans constantly applying judgment — through automated intelligence that knows how to operate across massive volumes of data.

Alejandro Cremades: That’s amazing. So obviously we’re talking about the future here. I want to talk about the past, but through the lens of reflection.

Let’s say I bring you back to 2019 — when you gave your notice after the RideOS acquisition and were about to figure things out. If you had the chance to go back to that moment and give your younger self one piece of advice before launching a business, what would that be and why, given what you know now?

Michel Tricot: I think as part of our exploration of what company or market we wanted to address, we spent time on areas where neither I nor my co-founder had a lot of expertise.

Michel Tricot: It’s easy to say in hindsight that maybe we shouldn’t have wasted time on those. If I were to go back and talk to my younger self, I’d say: “Man, you know what it means. You know the complexity of data. Just focus your exploration on any kind of data product. Don’t waste time on things you don’t know.”

Michel Tricot: But it’s easy to say in hindsight. We also learned a lot talking to people — self-driving car companies, banking and fintech companies. We may have wasted a bit of time, but we also gained valuable insights and learning from it.

Alejandro Cremades: That’s amazing. So Michel, for people listening who’d love to reach out and say hi, what’s the best way to do so?

Michel Tricot: First, we have a community Slack. On our website, you can join it — I’m available there. Otherwise, I’m also on LinkedIn. I try to give a window into the life of the company to the outside world.

Michel Tricot: As an open-source company, it’s very important that people are part of the story. We’re not the only ones creating it. So I’d say those are the two main channels.

Alejandro Cremades: That’s amazing. Well, Michel, thank you so much for being on The DealMaker Show today. It has been an absolute honor to have you with us.

Michel Tricot: Thank you for having me.

*****

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