Almost exactly a year ago, dbt Labs shined a spotlight on the opportunities in the world of developer tools for data analytics when the startup closed a Series D of $222 million at a $4.2 billion valuation. Yes, that was $2 billion lower than what it had been originally targeting, but CEO and founder Tristan Handy tells us, “It was our choice,” a cut he made anticipating a tough year ahead, and the pressures of growth, even at a fast-growing startup like dbt, to justify a $6.2 billion figure.
One year on, the company is using some of that money, and possibly a bit of the leverage afforded by the compressed market, to expand in a different way: it is acquiring Transform, a fellow analytics engineering firm.
Transform’s speciality is semantic tools to build data science insights from data troves that can be used for business intelligence, an …
