dbt Labs

Market leader and de facto standard for SQL-based data transformation in the modern data stack

dbt Labs, formerly known as Fishtown Analytics, is the company behind dbt (data build tool), an open-source transformation framework that has become the de facto standard for analytics engineering. dbt enables data analysts and engineers to write modular SQL-based transformations, run automated tests, and generate documentation — all within a version-controlled, software-engineering-inspired workflow. The company was founded in 2016 by Tristan Handy and Drew Bandy and has grown into one of the most influential players in the modern data stack ecosystem. dbt Labs offers both the open-source dbt Core (free, CLI-based) and dbt Cloud, a managed SaaS platform that adds scheduling, a web IDE, CI/CD integrations, observability, and collaboration features. The company has cultivated a massive community of data practitioners — the dbt Community — which includes tens of thousands of active members and has helped establish 'analytics engineering' as a recognized profession. This community-led growth strategy has made dbt a central hub in the modern data stack alongside cloud warehouses like Snowflake, BigQuery, and Databricks. While dbt Labs is primarily a data infrastructure and analytics engineering company rather than a pure AdTech player, it is widely used by AdTech and marketing data teams to model advertising performance data, attribution pipelines, and audience segmentation logic. Its integrations with major cloud data warehouses and its role in enabling clean, reliable data pipelines make it a critical enabler for data-driven advertising operations. The company has raised over $414 million in venture funding and is considered a key pillar of the modern data stack.