An analyst calculating advertising returns needs to connect spending with sales, update the calculation when new data arrives, and check that the results are correct. With dbt, analysts write database queries that turn stored data into tables for analysis. They can rerun those queries, test the results, and document how the calculations work.
Client projects funded a shared tool
The dbt repository dates to March 2016. Its 2018 documentation describes that workflow, including tracking which queries need the results of others.
Fishtown Analytics, the company behind dbt, used it in every client project. Founder Tristan Handy later wrote that services supported the company from July 2016 until it raised seed funding in November 2019.
A March 2018 release shows how customer-funded work reached the shared product: it thanks RealSelf for sponsoring support for BigQuery tables organized by date. Other dbt users received that functionality too.
Users took dbt to their next jobs
Fishtown's April 2020 funding announcement describes how adoption spread. Early users at Casper introduced dbt at subsequent employers. One founded Brooklyn Data and made dbt part of its consulting work.
The founder's account describes a route to adoption a star chart cannot show. People learned the tool through their jobs, then chose it again elsewhere.
Fishtown announced a $12.9 million Series A on 22 April 2020. It reported a community of almost 1,700 companies and 5,000 practitioners. Handy said the company needed more engineers to keep up with users and build the product faster.
Software revenue made consultants partners
Other consultancies helped spread dbt, but they also competed with Fishtown's services business.
By October 2020, Fishtown had reduced its consulting workload and committed to selling software. Partners could earn implementation fees while Fishtown sold dbt Cloud, a web-based product for developing, running, and monitoring dbt projects.
The company retained some services work to support customers and stay close to their problems. It no longer aimed to grow by delivering more consulting projects itself.
Funding followed more than GitHub interest
In the GitHub history collected for this article, each year from 2018 through 2022 accounts for more surviving stars than the year before.
| Year added | Stars still present |
|---|---|
| 2018 | 355 |
| 2019 | 632 |
| 2020 | 1,008 |
| 2021 | 1,603 |
| 2022 | 2,230 |
Fishtown announced a $29.5 million Series B in November 2020, months after Series A.
Handy said adoption had not suddenly jumped. Instead, a hot market, including Snowflake's IPO, and enthusiasm from dbt users brought investors to the company earlier than expected. Fishtown reported 3,000 companies using dbt weekly and 490 paying for dbt Cloud.
In June 2021, it renamed itself dbt Labs and announced a $150 million Series C, reporting 5,500 weekly user companies and 1,000 paying Cloud companies. By its February 2022 announcement of another $222 million, it reported over 9,000 companies using dbt in production and approximately 1,800 customers.
GitHub stars do not tell us how many teams use dbt or pay for it. The founder's accounts of users taking dbt to new employers describe how adoption spread; the reported Cloud customer counts provide separate evidence of a paid business.
Fishtown shifted its focus from delivering analytics projects to selling dbt Cloud, while continuing some services work and supporting consulting partners.
Sources and method
This article covers 2016–2022. GitHub's repository star history API counts only stars still present when collected, not historical displayed totals or product users. We grouped daily counts into calendar years using the returned week timestamps and day offsets; GitHub does not guarantee that these boundaries align with UTC. The repository now lives at dbt-labs/dbt; the dbt-labs/dbt-core URL redirects to the same repository.
Usage and customer figures are company-reported, with definitions that vary between announcements. Funding dates refer to announcements, not necessarily closing dates. The seed round is confirmed only to November 2019; we have not verified an exact day or amount.