dbt Labs raises $222M in Series D funding at $4.2B valuation led by Altimeter with participation from Databricks and Snowflake

The Series D funding round is the latest in a series of milestones solidifying dbt's position as the industry standard for data transformation in the cloud

PHILADELPHIA, Feb. 24, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- dbt Labs, the pioneer in analytics engineering, today announced that it has raised $222 million in Series D financing at a $4.2 billion valuation. The round was led by existing investor, Altimeter, with participation from existing investors Amplify Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, and Sequoia. New investors participating in the Series D include Coatue, Tiger Global, ICONIQ Growth, GV, and GIC. Three strategic investors representing leaders in the shift to the cloud – Databricks, Salesforce Ventures, and Snowflake – also participated. No new board members are joining the team.

dbt Labs

Demand for dbt is driven by the industry-wide shift to cloud-based data platforms like Snowflake, Google Bigquery, and Databricks. Over the past two years, dbt has emerged as the industry standard for data transformation in the cloud. dbt enables data teams to transform data in-warehouse, and deploy analytics code following software engineering best practices. This new way of working, known as analytics engineering, has been pioneered by dbt Labs alongside the global dbt Community of more than 25,000 data professionals.

The new round of funding will allow dbt Labs to build the next layer in the modern data stack. "As dbt has become accepted as the industry standard for data transformation, our most forward-thinking community members have begun musing publicly about the future of the modern data stack and about dbt's role in it," said Tristan Handy, Founder and CEO of dbt Labs. "As a data practitioner, I could not be more excited about our product roadmap: an open layer to define an organization's single source of truth, accessible via every BI and analytics tool."

Investment from the leading cloud data platforms is the latest milestone solidifying dbt's position as the accepted industry standard. Notable milestones from the past year include:

• Community growth: The dbt Community now includes 25,000 data professionals, 12 dbt Meetups in 8 countries, and more than 9,000 companies using dbt.
• Customer growth: dbt Labs increased annual recurring revenue by 6x in 2021, growing to a customer base of 1,800 accounts including JetBlue, Nasdaq, Lendlease, Dunelm, and Canva.
• User conference growth: dbt Labs hosted the largest global conference dedicated to analytics engineering with more than 7,000 attendees. Coalesce 2022 is scheduled for October 17-21.
• Deepened partnerships: The number of partner products supporting data transformation workloads with dbt increased by 2x in 2021. dbt Labs added integrations with partners including Firebolt, Materialize, Microsoft, Rockset, Starburst, and Teradata, in addition to existing integrations with AWS, Databricks, Google Cloud, and Snowflake products.
• New use cases: dbt Cloud APIs now powers more than 25 enterprise applications delivering solutions across categories of business intelligence, operational analytics, data discovery, data quality, and data governance.

"The data industry is converging around unified cloud data architectures supporting machine learning, data science, and business intelligence use cases," said Jamin Ball, Partner at Altimeter. "dbt is uniquely well-positioned for this future. dbt provides a transformation framework suited for the needs of data engineers, data scientists, and business analysts–multiple users with multiple use cases working from a single knowledge layer."

"Like the dbt Labs team, we believe that all data users should have access to the same powerful tools and workflows used by engineers," said Ali Ghodsi, CEO of Databricks. "With Databricks SQL, we're now enabling data warehouse workloads. And with dbt, analysts are able to access Databricks machine learning and data science capabilities. We're looking forward to deepening our partnership with dbt Labs over the coming years as, together, we expand what's possible in the modern data stack."

"The work the dbt Labs team does to help analysts create and disseminate organizational knowledge aligns with our mission to help our customers easily find insights, make better decisions and thrive in this new data-driven world," said Francois Ajenstat, Chief Product Officer of Tableau. "We are excited to see dbt Labs innovate the ways in which data is accessed, transformed and analyzed."

"Snowflake and dbt Labs share a common vision of data democratization. We see organizations unlock the power of their data when more people are able to participate in analytics processes," said Christian Kleinerman, SVP of Product at Snowflake. "By deepening our partnership with dbt Labs, we offer joint customers the ability to solve their business problems in a simple, scalable, and secure environment using the power of the Snowflake Data Cloud."

"We are looking forward to enhancing our data strategy with dbt," said Summer Collins, Head of Data and Growth Capability at Vodafone New Zealand. "We are undertaking a large digital transformation project in New Zealand to migrate to a modern platform and framework. Working with dbt greatly helps our speed of development, collaboration standards, and data quality."

About dbt Labs

Since 2016, dbt Labs has been on a mission to help analysts create and disseminate organizational knowledge. dbt Labs pioneered the practice of analytics engineering, built the primary tool in the analytics engineering toolbox, and has been fortunate enough to see a fantastic community coalesce to help push the boundaries of the analytics engineering workflow. Today there are 9,000 companies using dbt every week, 25,000 practitioners in the dbt Community Slack, and 1,800 companies paying for dbt Cloud.