dbt Cloud

Eight years ago, Tristan Handy and two analytics colleagues started a consulting venture to help companies transform data using new open-source software they named “data build tool” or dbt. They aimed to empower new “analytics engineers” that prepare data for analysts, thereby easing the burden on traditional data engineers. As adoption grew, these consultants introduced commercial software, giving birth to dbt Labs as a software vendor.

dbt Labs now serves 4,600 customers, including Conde Nast, Siemens and a wide range of cloud-native startups. It has raised $416 million from backers such as Altimeter, Databricks, Snowflake and Salesforce Ventures. Its partner ecosystem includes Fivetran for ingestion, Alation for cataloging, Monte Carlo for data observability, and Rudderstack for customer data management. dbt’s open-source community has swelled to 100,000 users.

dbt Cloud helps analytics engineers clean, model, test, deliver, observe and document data products using principles of continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD). By writing SQL select statements, for example, they can create interconnected models that populate data warehouse tables and views, which is particularly valuable for data-driven companies with a scripting preference. dbt’s semantic layer then presents analytics-ready data for BI reporting, dashboards, ML models and data-driven applications that run on cloud platforms.