Census was founded in 2018 by Boris Jabes and Sean Lynch. The company essentially named the “reverse ETL” category — the idea that data should flow not just into your warehouse, but back out to the operational tools where business teams actually work.
Traditional ETL moves data from operational systems into a warehouse for analysis. Reverse ETL takes the clean, modeled data in your warehouse and syncs it back to CRM systems, marketing tools, ad platforms, and customer success software. Census makes this sync reliable, scheduled, and governed.
The warehouse-native approach is central to Census’s architecture. It reads directly from your data warehouse (Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, Databricks) using SQL models you’ve already built, typically with dbt. There’s no separate data store or processing layer — your warehouse is the source of truth, and Census keeps downstream tools in sync with it.
Census supports over 200 destinations including Salesforce, HubSpot, Braze, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Marketo, Intercom, and Zendesk. The sync engine handles incremental updates, deduplication, and field mapping, managing the complexity that anyone who’s built custom API integrations knows all too well.
Audience Hub lets marketing teams build customer segments using warehouse data without writing SQL. They define audiences through a visual builder, and Census syncs those audiences to ad platforms and marketing tools. This gives marketers self-serve access to the richest data in the organization.
The company has also introduced AI-powered features for generating SQL models and recommending field mappings, reducing the technical work required to set up new syncs.
Census competes primarily with Hightouch in the reverse ETL space. The two companies have similar capabilities, and the choice between them often comes down to specific connector support and pricing.
