dbt Labs was founded in 2016 by Tristan Handy in Philadelphia. Handy had spent years as an analytics consultant and kept seeing the same problem: analysts could write SQL but didn’t have proper engineering tools for versioning, testing, and documenting their transformations. dbt (data build tool) was his answer.
dbt is an open-source command-line tool that lets analysts and analytics engineers write data transformations in SQL (or Python), then run those transformations inside a cloud data warehouse. It brings software engineering practices — version control, testing, documentation, CI/CD — to the world of data transformation.
dbt Cloud is the commercial product built on top of the open-source dbt Core. It provides a web-based IDE, job scheduling, environment management, semantic layer, and collaboration features. The dbt Semantic Layer lets organizations define business metrics once and use them consistently across different BI tools.
The company has built one of the strongest communities in the data world. dbt Community has over 70,000 members, and the annual Coalesce conference draws thousands of attendees. The open-source project has more than 9,000 GitHub stars and hundreds of community-maintained packages in the dbt Hub.
dbt Labs raised $222 million at a $4.2 billion valuation in 2022 from investors including Altimeter Capital, Sequoia Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz. The company serves thousands of organizations, including JetBlue, HubSpot, and Dunkin’.
Handy remains CEO and is widely recognized as a thought leader in the analytics engineering discipline that dbt helped create. The company employs approximately 500 people.
