Meltano raises $4.2M seed round (opens in new tab)

From an employee/engineering perspective, spinning out products with seed funding sounds like the coolest possible way to approach growth for established companies. The idea you could work somewhere big and then have the opportunity to do a startup with a direct piece of the upside seems amazing. From a product perspective, you get a clean slate and some sales support from your old company who have a stake in seeing you succeed.

How do investors feel about that though? I worked for a company that had raised several rounds from institutional money over a decade, and then it spun out one of its technology products into a new company with some select employees and a new cap table, and it was promptly acquired by a unicorn (8-12mos), leaving the other employees left behind to develop another product, with a good chance of this happening again, and the investors holding a piece of a what was essentially a farm team development shop.

Congratulations on this seed round, it's just exciting to see GitLab doing something this cool. This other pattern probably isn't a factor here, but I'd be interested in how you pitch spinoffs to investors.

Maybe swap some of their current equity for shares of the spinoff startup? It's interesting because I can think of a bunch of companies that have become too big to do anything new, and packaging this could be a real play.

Congratulations Douwe and team, I can't wait to see what you build next!

I'm super excited to see Meltano will applied across all sorts of industries!

This is great news. Excited to see where this heads!

Congrats Douwe and team! I'm super excited!

could anyone tldr what meltano does and where the name comes from? is it mELTano of ELT?