“Fivetran In Talks to Buy Dbt Labs”, reports The Information

A story in The Information published on Saturday 27th September 2025 reports that “Data Startup Fivetran In Talks to Buy Dbt Labs in Multibillion Dollar Deal”.

The article is behind a paywall but in summary, says that:

• Fivetran is in advanced discussions to buy dbt Labs (but is not yet finalized or terms agreed, etc)
• The merger aims to create a comprehensive, full-service data platform by combining Fivetran’s data extraction and loading with dbt Labs’ data transformation tools, and designed to help the combined entity better compete against emerging AI-driven competitors.
• The acquisition is seen as a strategic step to gain the scale and financial standing (over $400 million in annual recurring revenue) needed for an Initial Public Offering, and could value the new company between $5bn-$10bn

(Disclosure: Rittman Analytics partners with Fivetran, dbt Labs and many other vendors we mention in this blog including Dagster, Google Cloud, Snowflake, Rudderstack, Hightouch and Google Cloud. See our website for more details on partnerships and our previous blogs on industry topics)

So Why Is This A Big Deal?

The modern data stack had at its heart a best-of-breed, modular philosophy with Fivetran synonymous with ingestion (ELT), dbt Labs with transformation and Census with activation. Each layer was designed to interoperate and work to common standards, giving customers the flexibility to swap Fivetran for Airbyte, dbt for SQLMesh or Dataform and Census for Hightouch, for example.

If the story in The Information is true and Fivetran, having also recently acquired reverse-ETL vendor Census, were to combine these elements into a single organisation it would challenge that model and make the future more like Oracle and Informatica than a loose ecosystem of specialist tools and vendors.

And the timing is also quite surprising, given Fivetran only just acquired Tobiko Labs, the team behind SQLMesh and SQLGlot; the combined Christmas Party at least should be fun this year if they put headlines such as “Is dbt Fusion the death of dbt Core?” and “dbt + SDF: What Changes and What Doesn’t” in the Christmas crackers and ask people to guess who wrote them.

What Would This Mean for the Industry?

If Fivetran succeeds in bringing ingestion, transformation, and activation into one platform, other modern data stack vendors may need to find partners quickly; reverse ETL, observability, and orchestration are all areas where stand-alone players may increasingly look vunerable and conclude that scale and breadth are necessary to remain relevant.

• For example, Hightouch and RudderStack could look to partner more deeply with observability or orchestration vendors, or even combine with each other, to counterbalance Fivetran + Census.
• Prefect and Dagster might consider closer alliances with ingestion or transformation players, positioning themselves as the “control plane” for an increasingly consolidated stack.
• Monte Carlo, Bigeye, and Soda may need to partner with either warehouses (Snowflake, Databricks) or ingestion vendors to ensure they remain embedded in the flow of data rather than being an add-on.
• Cloud data warehouses Snowflake, Databricks and BigQuery have all been building their own ingestion and transformation features (and integrations with dbt such as dbt Projects on Snowflake; a combined Fivetran–dbt–Census stack would give them a stronger independent competitor.

What about Customers, Data Teams and dbt’s Community?

There are clearly a number of practical advantages that an integrated Fivetran–dbt–Census offering could bring to customers and the broader ecosystem; for example:

• Today’s modern data stack often requires careful configuration and monitoring of multiple vendor tools. A single provider for ingestion, transformation, and activation could reduce operational complexity while SQLMesh’s optimisation technology could add smarter scheduling to dbt’s transformation framework.
• With multiple vendors, accountability can blur when things go wrong while a vertically integrated provider could offer clearer service levels and a “single throat to choke” for support.

But obviously an acquisition of dbt Labs, with its historically open-source roots, could test the balance between community-driven innovation and commercial strategy and might alter perceptions in customers’ minds of neutrality and stewardship.

And so even at the level of speculation, there are practical questions for data teams to consider if this deal were to go through:

• How much value do you place on modularity versus integration?
• What risks are you willing to accept in exchange for simplified vendor management?
• How do you protect against lock-in, especially where transformation logic or metadata may become tightly coupled to a single provider?

Nothing is confirmed in-terms of this particular deal, but it’s clear that Fivetran is no longer positioning itself as just “the data ingestion company.” The acquisitions of Tobiko Data and Census already showed a move toward platformisation and the possibility of dbt Labs joining that mix highlights the industry trend away from modular ecosystems to integrated platforms.

For customers, the right response is not to panic but to plan; now is the time to think carefully about where integration helps, where modularity still matters, and how to preserve optionality in an environment where vendors are consolidating fast.

INTERESTED? FIND OUT MORE!

Rittman Analytics is a boutique data analytics consultancy that helps ambitious, digital-native businesses scale-up their approach to data, analytics and the modern data stack. We’re authorised delivery partners for Google Cloud along with Oracle, Segment, Cube, Dagster, Preset, dbt Labs and Fivetran and are experts at helping you and your data team build an analytics solution that’s right for your needs, budget and use-cases.

If you’re looking for some help and assistance with your Looker initiative or would just like to talk shop and share ideas and thoughts on what’s going on in your organisation and the wider data analytics world, contact us now to organise a 100%-free, no-obligation call — we’d love to hear from you!

design or scale-up an analytics solution that’s right for your organisation’s needs, use-cases and budget and working with you and your data team to successfully implement it.

Recent Posts

RSS Feed

Published Year

Tag Cloud