David Hsu

Founder and CEO @ Retool

David is the founder and CEO of Retool, which he started after studying Computer Science and Philosophy at Oxford. He built Retool into the platform used by tens of thousands of engineering teams at companies like Disney, Airbnb, and Mercedes-Benz to build internal software faster.

Articles

• Ship vibe-coded apps to production

Meet the new Retool: a full-stack AI app builder on React and TypeScript, with MCP support and built-in enterprise governance.

• Code is free. Now what?

Hear from David Hsu, Retool's founder, on what's broken across enterprise software—and the platform changes Retool is making to fix it.

• Introducing enterprise AppGen: Software that starts with a sentence and ends in production

Retool launches enterprise AppGen: AI-powered app generation that’s fast, secure, and production-ready from the moment you hit “build.”

• Retool Agents has arrived: 100 million hours already automated, and we’re just getting started

See how Retool’s Agents turns AI into action: combining LLMs with real tools to automate work, drive ROI, and unlock the next era of enterprise software.

• Introducing pricing, v2

We’re excited to introduce the second iteration of pricing for Retool, which is cheaper for nearly every customer.

• Retool's CEO on the operations behind winning early sales deals

Every month, our Operator Playbook series interviews early employees at fast-growing startups about the technology, processes, and decisions that helped them scale.

• Introducing Mark Schaaf, Retool’s new COO

Mark Schaaf is joining Retool as our first Chief Operating Officer. As a developer-first company, it was important that we have a highly engineering-focused COO.

• Retool’s Series C2 fundraise

We’re excited to share that we’ve raised $45M at a $3.2B valuation. Our Series C2 is a continuation of our unconventional approach to fundraising—instead of raising the maximum amount at the highest valuation, we raise small rounds at lower valuations, which minimizes dilution and preserves upside for employees. Our fundraising strategy is optimized for our team, not for vanity metrics. (We think those vanity metrics are distracting; we prefer to focus on our core work: shipping great products)

• Raising less money at lower valuations

Many startups today fundraise with the goal of getting the most money at the highest valuation possible. But at Retool, we decided to take the opposite strategy.

• Scaling an on-prem first SaaS company to tens of millions of ARR

How we decided to build both a cloud and on-prem option for Retool, the challenges, and why it's becoming more common to offer both.

• Retool raises $50M led by Sequoia

With the customer traction we've seen so far, we're delighted to announce that Retool has raised a $50M Series B, led by Sequoia.