# Michel Tricot

> Michel Tricot is the French-born engineer, co-founder, and CEO of Airbyte, the San Francisco data-integration company he started with Jean Lafleur after years of watching teams rebuild the same connectors. His career has moved from financial data at FactSet through internet-scale systems at Rapleaf and LiveRamp and mobility infrastructure at rideOS. Airbyte emerged from a disciplined 2020 pivot, using open source to make data movement extensible; Tricot is now directing the company toward the context infrastructure required by production AI agents.

- **Role:** CEO and Co-Founder at Airbyte
- **Organizations:** Airbyte, rideOS, LiveRamp, Rapleaf, FactSet, Y Combinator
- **Education:** Master of Science in Computer Science, EPITA - École pour l'informatique et les techniques avancées
- **Known for:** Co-founded Airbyte and developed it from a pre-idea Y Combinator company into an open-source data-integration business., Helped Airbyte raise approximately $181 million across seed, Series A, and Series B financing announced in 2021., Built and scaled more than 1,000 data connectors at LiveRamp that moved hundreds of terabytes each day.

## Career timeline

- **2008** — Started his career as an R&D engineer at FactSet in Paris.
- **2011** — Moved to San Francisco to join Rapleaf, whose data-onboarding business became LiveRamp.
- **2011-2017** — Built and scaled more than 1,000 data connectors at Rapleaf/LiveRamp, moving hundreds of terabytes daily; later served as engineering director and head of integrations.
- **2017-2019** — Worked at rideOS as a founding member and director of engineering.
- **2019** — Left rideOS, took a month off, and began a structured company-idea search with longtime collaborator Jean Lafleur.
- **2020-01** — Joined Y Combinator's W20 batch with Lafleur and incorporated the company initially called Daxtarity.
- **2020-03** — Abandoned a marketing-oriented data product as COVID disrupted its customer base and returned to intensive customer discovery.
- **2020-07** — Committed to a one-month build-and-test cycle for an open-source data-integration product that became Airbyte.
- **2020-09** — Released Airbyte's first public version; roughly 100 users tried it in its first week.
- **2021-03** — Airbyte announced a $5.2 million seed round led by Accel.
- **2021-05** — Airbyte announced a $26 million Series A led by Benchmark.
- **2021-12** — Airbyte raised a $150 million Series B at a reported $1.5 billion valuation.
- **2024-09** — Airbyte released version 1.0 of its data-integration platform.
- **2025-09** — Airbyte introduced version 2.0, expanding the platform for AI-oriented data workloads.
- **2026-05** — Airbyte launched Airbyte Agents and related context infrastructure for AI agents.

## Achievements

- Co-founded Airbyte and developed it from a pre-idea Y Combinator company into an open-source data-integration business.
- Helped Airbyte raise approximately $181 million across seed, Series A, and Series B financing announced in 2021.
- Built and scaled more than 1,000 data connectors at LiveRamp that moved hundreds of terabytes each day.
- Led Airbyte's evolution from an open-source ELT project into a broader platform spanning replication, activation, and AI-agent context.
- Built a public body of writing and interviews about open source, data movement, product discovery, and agentic infrastructure.

## Latest updates

- **2026-08** — Published guidance on designing state machines for long-running business workflows.
- **2026-07** — Wrote about confidence thresholds, approval gates, rate-limit-aware orchestration, context, and data sovereignty for AI-agent systems.
- **2026-06** — Announced the Airbyte Agent CLI and published technical guidance on transactional workflows across non-transactional APIs.
- **2026-05** — Led the launch of Airbyte Agents, the Agent SDK, Airbyte MCP, and context infrastructure aimed at production AI agents.
- **2026-01** — Airbyte joined the Agentic AI Foundation; Tricot published a series arguing for open agentic data infrastructure.

## Links

- Website: https://airbyte.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/micheltricot
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/MichelTricot
- GitHub: https://github.com/michel-tricot
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQ_JWEFzs1_INqdhIO3kmrw
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AirbyteHQ

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/michel-tricot
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-08-24