Airtable acquihires onboarding startup Dopt for AI talent | TechCrunch

Airtable today announced that it has acquired Dopt, a startup focused on helping other startups build product onboarding experiences for new users.

Earlier this year, Dopt introduced a number of features that helped users add AI-based assistance tools to their respective services — those are the main reason Airtable is now acquiring the company. The acquisition closed late last month and Dopt will wind down its service on August 15. The Dopt team will join Airtable’s AI group.

As Airtable co-founder and CEO Howie Liu told TechCrunch, all of this is part of his company’s overall approach to AI. After going through a hyper-growth phase in the early days of the Covid pandemic, the company experienced a bit of a slowdown, just like most other startups (though Liu stressed that Airtable always continued to grow).

“Speaking from my own vantage point, it felt like a real kind of gear shift,” he told me. “Like it was a different mode. And I think it also kind of pushed us to really focus on what’s the strategy? What are the big bets that we want to make?”

Being resource-constrained, Liu argued, breeds “a certain kind of creativity” and forces companies to be clever about how they allocate the resources they do have.

Like so many other startups, Airtable’s current bet is AI. Just last week, it launched Airtable Cobuilder, which allows its users to create apps by simply describing them in a Copilot-like chat interface.

“I think AI, to me, represents two things really: one is, it represents a way that you can make it even easier yet for people to build software. Like the Cobuilder launch – that was about lowering the floor. We literally did speculate about this back in the day: maybe, someday, we can actually offer a way for people to just talk to Airtable and it will build the app for you. We’re literally now here. I don’t think I expected it to get here so fast and for it to be so effective.”

Liu stressed that the Dopt acquisition is primarily about talent. He liked the team, he said, but also noted that even though Dopt only focused on onboarding, “when you do onboarding for not just your own company but for many other companies, you just develop a really good feel for how to make experiences really intuitive.” Inside of Airtable, the Dopt team will be tasked with bringing additional AI capabilities to market and developing the user experience around that.

The two companies did not disclose the price of the acquisition. Prior to this exit, Oakland-based Dopt raised a $5.1 million seed round in 2022, with Unusual Ventures, Designer Fund and a number of angels participating.