dbt-labs
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The Tiny SQL Tool That Taught 100,000 Data Teams to Think Like Software Engineers
dbt began as a practical fix for analysts stuck between raw warehouse tables and impatient colleagues. A decade later, its workflow sits inside more than 100,000 data teams - and a completed merger with Fivetran is turning that humble idea into a bid for the data layer beneath enterprise AI.
Tristan Handy
Tristan Handy is the co-founder of dbt Labs (formerly Fishtown Analytics), the company behind dbt (data build tool) - the open-source transformation layer that helped define the modern data stack and spawned the analytics engineering profession. Starting with $10,000 of his own money in 2016, he bootstrapped for four years before raising $410M and reaching a $4.2B valuation. Following a 2025 merger with Fivetran, he now serves as Co-Founder and President of the combined entity on a path to IPO. He also writes the Analytics Engineering Roundup newsletter, which has 30,000+ subscribers.