I think consolidation in the space has been coming for quite some time now and this merger only confirms what us, along with many others, have been saying: the data tooling is in a miserable state and we had to glue together a bunch of different tools that don't work with each other.
At this point, I think it is quite obvious that Fivetran is going for Snowflake/Databricks's market share. They own the ingestion for many companies already, and they will offer a managed data lake product in order to compete with the data giants. By owning the means of bringing the data in (Fivetran) as well as the transformation layer (dbt/sqlmesh) they will aim to get ahead of Snowflakes of the world.
I think it'll be a win for the data community if they maintain and continue investing into the existing tooling, as they are running in quite a few places already, especially dbt core running in a self-managed way. I certainly hope they won't try to squeeze revenue for the sake of it from their combined users.
It's an interesting time to be in the space, and it feels great to be one of the few independent players in the market.
With Snowflake's new OpenFlow offering based on Apache Nifi, Snowflake will be able to become Fivetran faster than Fivetran can become Snowflake/Databricks, though....
How will Fivetran and dbt who are detested for being overpriced and underfeatured in the segment they are supposed to be good at (ETL/ELT) be taking on being a datalake? That's orders of magnitude more complex in engineering and operating and they have no experience. This is really a play to consolidate, get rid of duplicate functions and provide a better experience to customers.
Fivetran acquired Census (reverse-etl) & Tobiko (dbt alternative).
I wonder who's next to really consolidate their platform play and compete with the old legacy MDM provider like Informatica. Data Observability or Catalog like Monte Carlo and Atlan. The whole Modern Data Stack has either died, acquired or merged by now. Wonder what's missing for Fivetran to IPO too.
I also wonder what this merge means for Airbyte who raised 150m at 1.5b in 2023.
Observability is a good guess, but I'd venture to guess that the conversations going on internally are about how to capture value across the entire stack. I wouldn't be surprised if we hear about them acquiring either a database/warehouse company and/or an analytics solution. Or vice versa, them getting acquired by a bigger player that wants to offer more connectors and data modeling functionality.
The "modern data stack" market excluding of data warehouse / data lake is pretty small. Fivetran is biggest one and still under $500M in revenue, so they're acquiring other parts and starting to offer their own datalake (managed Iceberg).
Snowflake started offering fivetran-like connectors a couple years ago and I expect they'll double down there. Same with Databricks. Microsoft has Fabric now, but the reviews have been terrible (my experience included).
I think they'll each ultimately have a full data stack.
If you don't want to wait, we built a modern-data-stack-in-a-box at Definite (https://www.definite.app/).
Interesting. It makes sense with Fivetran and dbt being so complimentary, ingestion (Fivetran) vs transformation (DBT).
But I still feel like I'm missing, in DBT, capabilities for DB DDL/DML deployment (which I've done from Liquibase in DBT) for a fully CICD modern data stack. Preconditions, post-conditions, only-deploy-changed-code capabilities... Am I missing something in DBT?
They specifically mention the dbt-core will remain open source and will be supported. However this type of consolidation will very likely bring increased prices.
I hope Fivetran alternatives like dlt remain open source.
That was the first thought I had, too. When the dot-com bubble burst, every VC was slapping companies together to try to forestall the black mark of having a “failure” and balance sheet write off that they would have to show the LPs (investors) in the next LP meeting. It got so bad that someone described it as “tying together two rocks and seeing if they will float.” Needless to say, most didn’t. So, this makes me wonder if we’re seeing the first signs of the bursting of the AI bubble which we all know we’re in the middle of. Maybe it’s legit and there is real “synergy” or whatever, but the fact that this is two companies within the same VC portfolio makes it suspect.
That happened at a company I was at 8 years ago. It acquired a company also owned by the major investor. Layoffs started with a month. They whole thing shut down within 6 months.
Maybe, but now they could IPO confidentially as a tech company with high revenue with a multi-billion dollar valuation, which sort of sounds like their end goal
those are heavy accusations to toss around and that the title would like you to conclude, but doesnt pass the basic smell check of fivetran's founders still having control of the company. dbt was the hottest company in the data world 3 years ago and is valuable.
Thoughts on possible implications for users in foreseeable future? We built a lot using dbt and can't really think of going back or switching to alternatives
Full disclosure: I am a PM at Fivetran who is very excited about this.
We are fully committed to open source dbt and don't want to build a 'walled garden'. Interoperability is one of the key value propositions of both Fivetran and dbt. While I'm biased, I think the main implications for users is that their favorite tooling will be with one vendor who cares about what makes them great.
Fivetran isn't really much of a transformation layer so this is likely just a move to lock-in customers of both companies by upselling an ingestion/transformation layer to existing customers.
The bigger question mark to me is that Fivetran recently acquired Tobiko, the company behind a dbt competitor SQLMesh. The Tobiko team said their focus has been on dbt-compatibility because a lot of Fivetran customers use dbt for their transformation layer. I fear it may have just been a way to get rid of competition leading up to this deal. I can't imagine Fivetran spent a ton of money just to have 2 products that do very similar things.
We use both open-source SQLMesh as well as their cloud offering Tobiko Cloud. Following the acquisition, we were annoyed that focus was going to go to dbt compatibility because there was a bunch of stuff on their roadmap that would help us that was now deprioritized. Thankfully, they still offer great support to us and delivered a few features that have given us some quality of life improvements. With this announcement, I'm worried we're going to end up being forced to migrate to dbt...
I'm wondering too. We run dbt on-prem. Worst that could happen is we don't get any more free updates. But we have the software and it will continue to run.
What's the problem specifically? Are you banking on some future features? Can't fix the bugs yourself? Worried it won't be compatible with future data warehouses?
I know people don't like it these days, but you can just continue to run old software.
> Data startups Fivetran and dbt Labs will merge in an all-stock deal, creating a combined data infrastructure company with nearly $600 million in annual revenue, the two companies told Reuters.
I think consolidation in the space has been coming for quite some time now and this merger only confirms what us, along with many others, have been saying: the data tooling is in a miserable state and we had to glue together a bunch of different tools that don't work with each other.
At this point, I think it is quite obvious that Fivetran is going for Snowflake/Databricks's market share. They own the ingestion for many companies already, and they will offer a managed data lake product in order to compete with the data giants. By owning the means of bringing the data in (Fivetran) as well as the transformation layer (dbt/sqlmesh) they will aim to get ahead of Snowflakes of the world.
I think it'll be a win for the data community if they maintain and continue investing into the existing tooling, as they are running in quite a few places already, especially dbt core running in a self-managed way. I certainly hope they won't try to squeeze revenue for the sake of it from their combined users.
It's an interesting time to be in the space, and it feels great to be one of the few independent players in the market.
Thoughts?
I wonder who's next to really consolidate their platform play and compete with the old legacy MDM provider like Informatica. Data Observability or Catalog like Monte Carlo and Atlan. The whole Modern Data Stack has either died, acquired or merged by now. Wonder what's missing for Fivetran to IPO too.
I also wonder what this merge means for Airbyte who raised 150m at 1.5b in 2023.
The "modern data stack" market excluding of data warehouse / data lake is pretty small. Fivetran is biggest one and still under $500M in revenue, so they're acquiring other parts and starting to offer their own datalake (managed Iceberg).
Snowflake started offering fivetran-like connectors a couple years ago and I expect they'll double down there. Same with Databricks. Microsoft has Fabric now, but the reviews have been terrible (my experience included).
I think they'll each ultimately have a full data stack.
If you don't want to wait, we built a modern-data-stack-in-a-box at Definite (https://www.definite.app/).
But I still feel like I'm missing, in DBT, capabilities for DB DDL/DML deployment (which I've done from Liquibase in DBT) for a fully CICD modern data stack. Preconditions, post-conditions, only-deploy-changed-code capabilities... Am I missing something in DBT?
Verifying schema changes pre-production is only part of the issues, figuring out the actual data changes caused by code logic changes is trickier.
I hope Fivetran alternatives like dlt remain open source.
We are fully committed to open source dbt and don't want to build a 'walled garden'. Interoperability is one of the key value propositions of both Fivetran and dbt. While I'm biased, I think the main implications for users is that their favorite tooling will be with one vendor who cares about what makes them great.
You can read a bit more here: https://www.fivetran.com/blog/the-era-of-open-data-infrastru...
The bigger question mark to me is that Fivetran recently acquired Tobiko, the company behind a dbt competitor SQLMesh. The Tobiko team said their focus has been on dbt-compatibility because a lot of Fivetran customers use dbt for their transformation layer. I fear it may have just been a way to get rid of competition leading up to this deal. I can't imagine Fivetran spent a ton of money just to have 2 products that do very similar things.
We use both open-source SQLMesh as well as their cloud offering Tobiko Cloud. Following the acquisition, we were annoyed that focus was going to go to dbt compatibility because there was a bunch of stuff on their roadmap that would help us that was now deprioritized. Thankfully, they still offer great support to us and delivered a few features that have given us some quality of life improvements. With this announcement, I'm worried we're going to end up being forced to migrate to dbt...
I expect they’ll keep developing Fusion but possibly as even more of a commercial-only offering than it already was.
I know people don't like it these days, but you can just continue to run old software.
last update we had was Fivetran had 200m in 2023 and 300m in 2024 (https://www.fivetran.com/press/fivetran-surpasses-300m-arr-d...)
if Fivetran continued at same pace in 2025, that means it's at 400m ish and dbt was at 200m. not bad for dbt.