Fishtown Analytics

Pioneer and market leader in the analytics engineering space, with dbt becoming the de facto standard for SQL-based data transformation in the modern data stack

Fishtown Analytics was founded in Philadelphia to develop and commercialize dbt (data build tool), an open-source framework that enables data analysts and engineers to transform raw data in their warehouses using SQL. The company popularized the concept of 'analytics engineering' as a discipline, empowering analysts to apply software engineering best practices — version control, testing, documentation, and modular code — to their data transformation workflows. dbt quickly became a foundational tool in the modern data stack, sitting between data ingestion tools and BI platforms. The company offered dbt Core as a free, open-source CLI tool and dbt Cloud as a managed SaaS platform providing scheduling, a web-based IDE, collaboration features, and observability. This open-core business model drove massive community adoption, with tens of thousands of practitioners using dbt globally. Fishtown Analytics became a central figure in the 'modern data stack' movement alongside companies like Snowflake, Fivetran, and Looker. In 2021, Fishtown Analytics officially rebranded to dbt Labs to better align its corporate identity with its flagship product. Under the dbt Labs name, the company continued to grow rapidly, raising significant venture funding and expanding its enterprise customer base. While not a core AdTech company, dbt/dbt Labs is widely used by AdTech and marketing analytics teams to model and transform advertising performance data across platforms.