dbt Labs Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Transform, Accelerating development of the dbt Semantic Layer

Enhanced functionality of the dbt Semantic Layer will empower data practitioners with critical business metrics

PHILADELPHIA – February 8, 2023 – dbt Labs, the pioneer in analytics engineering, today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Transform, the innovators behind the modern data stack’s semantic layer founded by former leaders of Airbnb's Data Platform team. The acquisition will accelerate development of the dbt Semantic Layer following its launch at Coalesce 2022 — providing greater flexibility to organizations of all sizes seeking metric consistency across their stack.

Transform’s technology will expand and enhance the functionality of the dbt Semantic Layer, which enables organizations to centrally define business metrics in dbt then query them from any analytics tool. This ensures that critical definitions such as “revenue,” “customer count,” or “churn rate” are consistent across all applications.

The dbt Semantic Layer has seen industry-wide buy-in since launching in public preview in October 2022 with 14 integration partners, including many of the most critical tools in the modern data stack.

“Transform’s founders are true innovators, having developed best-in-breed technology that will bring new capabilities to dbt’s Semantic Layer that our user base is excited about,” said Tristan Handy, founder and CEO of dbt Labs. “dbt has already created a standard for data transformation in the modern data stack, and with this transaction, we’ll be ready to do the same for the semantic layer.”

Following the closing of the transaction, the capabilities of Transform’s MetricFlow will be merged with the dbt Semantic Layer, furthering the organizations’ shared vision of empowering data practitioners to create and disseminate organizational knowledge by ensuring that the metric definition is part of the modeling layer, rather than the business intelligence layer where it has traditionally lived.

Transform’s entire founding team will join dbt Labs and continue working to innovate and accelerate the semantic layer. This includes co-founder and CEO Nick Handel, co-founder and COO James Mayfield, and co-founder and Software Engineer Paul Yang.

“We are immensely proud of what the team at Transform built and that MetricFlow will be such a significant piece of the future of the dbt Semantic Layer,” said Nick Handel, co-founder and CEO at Transform. “We have an exciting shared vision for how dbt and MetricFlow can fit seamlessly together. Our experience in this space and dbt Labs’ unmatched industry standing could not make more sense together. All of that and our two incredible cultures make this a natural fit. We’re thrilled to work together.”

For more information on the dbt Semantic Layer, see here. And for additional perspective on today’s news from CEO Tristan Handy, see this blog post.

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 19,000 companies using dbt every week, 65,000 dbt Community members, and over 3,000+ companies paying for dbt Cloud.