Keboola

The team behind Keboola ran a cloud migration agency helping companies like Red Bull transition to the cloud. As they repeated the same data integration work for client after client, they realized they were solving the same problem over and over. "We were lazy," the founder joked. "Because we had done it so many times, there has to be a better way." They started building internal automations, and by 2014, they made the leap: this should be a product, not just an internal tool.

Unlike many startups, Keboola chose not to raise venture capital early on. "Once you raise, you better know what you want to do with the money," the founder explained. In 2014, they didn't need servers to buy—AWS made infrastructure cheap. They had paying customers from their agency and could bootstrap. They built an end-to-end platform addressing what Snowflake hadn't: the 20+ different tools needed to move data in and out of the data warehouse. Keboola offered one login, 1,400 integrations (built by 400 developers), automation capabilities, and a data science layer.

Their first few years of growth came almost entirely through referrals. Customers who used Keboola grew their own companies—some became unicorns like ProductBoard and the Rohri Group. The founder recalled: "People started to use us. They started to grow their own companies, right?" But they also did something unconventional for a young SaaS company: they partnered with organizations like Czech IT Girls to build community. Their "Data Girls" program trained over 20,000 women globally in data skills. One customer, Rossum AI (on track to become a unicorn), called the founder and said: "I'm trying to hire a head of our data team. This is the fourth candidate who said they'd only join if we have a Keboola license." That's the power of community.

Transitioning from agency to product forced hard choices. They had to give up lucrative professional services revenue and build a partner ecosystem instead. "In the first year, we made 0.7 of our target, but our partners made four times that money," the founder shared. However, they later learned a critical lesson: SMB companies can rely on partners, but enterprise customers need professional services. UiPath proved the point—47% of their recurring revenue came from professional services when they went public.

During COVID, Keboola was overexposed to hospitality and retail clients who went bankrupt. They also held one massive contract with an Asian financial institution that lost 90% of its business in the first month. But this taught them resilience and the importance of diversification.

They also made financial mistakes. Coming from Eastern Europe with a "cash is king" mentality, they avoided financial instruments, loans, and venture debt. "If we would have known how to use it sooner, we would have scaled even faster," the founder admitted. They should have hired a CFO earlier to navigate options like venture debt and EU subsidies.

In response to COVID and the need to scale beyond direct sales, Keboola opened a freemium tier, unlocking product-led growth. Last year, 3,000 companies created Keboola accounts; this year, 4,000. Of the 3,000 from last year, 1,000 engaged (connected data, built pipelines). 400 use it daily on the free tier (with 300 free minutes per month). Already, 100 paid, and 10 of those converted to paid plans. "That's the power of product-led growth," the founder said. Their enterprise strategy and partner ecosystem, built over five years, finally materialized. The platform now processes massive volumes of raw data into business insights for thousands of companies monthly.