About dbt Labs
dbt Labs, originally founded in 2016 under the name Fishtown Analytics by Tristan Handy and Drew Banin, created dbt (data build tool) out of direct consulting experience helping companies build data analytics pipelines, observing that the "transformation" step of the data pipeline, meaning the process of cleaning, reshaping, and combining raw data into well-structured tables ready for analysis, was often handled through ad hoc, poorly organized SQL scripts lacking the testing, version control, and documentation practices that had become standard in professional software engineering, making data pipelines difficult to maintain, debug, and trust as organizations' data and analytics needs grew more complex.
dbt lets data analysts and engineers write data transformations using standard SQL, the query language most data professionals already know, while applying software engineering best practices including version control, automated testing to catch data quality issues, and documentation, on top of those SQL transformations, helping bring more rigor and reliability to a part of the data pipeline that had historically been managed less formally than the code that data teams write for other purposes. The tool became foundational to what's often called the "modern data stack," a set of complementary tools including cloud data warehouses, data ingestion tools, and business intelligence platforms that many data teams have adopted together, with dbt specifically handling the transformation layer connecting raw ingested data to analysis-ready datasets. dbt Labs commercializes the open-source dbt project primarily through dbt Cloud, a managed service that handles scheduling, orchestration, and collaboration features for teams using dbt, letting data teams avoid managing the underlying infrastructure and tooling themselves. The company has raised very substantial venture funding from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, and Altimeter Capital, reaching a valuation exceeding $4 billion, and dbt has become one of the most widely adopted open-source tools among data engineering and analytics teams globally.
