TextQL raises $17M to connect enterprise analytics sprawl — CIOs are already planning to rip out Salesforce for Postgres

TextQL raises $17M to connect enterprise analytics sprawl

TextQL's pitch is that every large enterprise is drowning in data infrastructure it can't unify — roughly 150 databases, 10 BI tools, 20,000 charts, and 400,000 tables, depending on the organization — and every existing vendor's answer is a multi-year, eight-figure migration into their own stack. TextQL's alternative is to connect everything in place rather than move it.

Ethan Ding and Bart (co-founder and CTO) started the company in late 2022, just before ChatGPT launched, and rebuilt the product roughly ten times before landing on that positioning. The earliest version was a text box that turned plain-English questions into SQL and handed it back to the user to paste wherever they needed it. The current product sits across Databricks, Snowflake, and similar low-level infrastructure layers without requiring migration.

“The typical enterprise has 150 databases, 10 different dashboards, 20,000 different charts, 400,000 tables. In the past three months, I've heard six different CIOs of Fortune 100s talk about how they're ready to do a two-year migration off Salesforce — not to another vendor, just to Postgres — to free up money to spend on GPUs.”

The Salesforce signal

The sharpest data point Ding shares is anecdotal but hard to ignore. In roughly the past three months, six different CIOs or chief business officers at Fortune 100 companies have told him they are prepared to run a two-year migration off Salesforce — not to another CRM vendor, but to Postgres hosted on Google Cloud or AWS. The logic is that they need to free up budget for AI inference spend, and legacy SaaS licensing is where they are looking first. Ding frames a CRM as the second most important system of record at an enterprise after the ERP, so the willingness to entertain ripping it out suggests a materially higher appetite for disruption than most industry observers are pricing in, particularly coming from hundred-year-old companies rather than tech-native ones.

Vibe procurement

Ding's read on why enterprise software contracts shift is less about product capability than perception. Drawing on Larry Ellison's framing of enterprise sales, he argues that incoming CIOs, whose average tenure is around five years, survey the market for who has the best positioning and then move eight-figure budgets accordingly. When a vendor's stock is falling or its sales team starts offering discounts, the most aggressive customers move first, the sales team gets demoralized, and the discount cycle accelerates. By Ding's account, several incumbent SaaS vendors are already in that spiral.

Funding

TextQL closed $17M across a two-part round, led first by Hoth Capital and then by Blackstone.