Philadelphia software firm dbt Labs raised $150 million in a Series C, securing new capital just seven months after its previous funding round.
The latest infusion brings the recently rebranded company's valuation to $1.5 billion, said CEO Tristan Handy.
Formerly known as Fishtown Analytics, the five-year-old startup will use the cash to build on dbt, its fast-growing open source analytics tool that lets clients input their own raw data to turn it into clean data insights. The latest capital raise piggybacks on its $29.5 million Series B funding round and a $12.9 million Series A in April 2020.
Altimeter Capital joined to co-lead the round alongside existing Silicon Valley investors Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz. Previous investor Amplify Partners also participated in the round.
No new board members will join dbt Labs as a result of the investments.
Handy isn’t yet focusing on taking dbt Labs to another capital raise. Before pursuing new funding, he said the goal is to accelerate revenue growth so that the company's next round could likely be the last before going public.
“I don't actually know what the future holds, but I do believe that we are currently capitalized to start growing revenue in a really serious way,” he said.
Though the funding rounds have come back-to-back and grown substantially in value, Handy said the $150 million was raised to compete in the rapidly growing cloud-based space while the dbt product is used alongside data tools from massive companies like Snowflake (NYSE: SNOW), Databricks or Google-owned BigQuery. IT research firm Gartner anticipates spending on cloud services to grow 23.1% to more than $330 billion in 2021.
“These are all multibillion-dollar companies. They're some of the biggest platforms, products in tech, and we are still — with this fundraise — this tiny, tiny little fish,” Handy said. “And this is really about us even being equipped to swim in the same pond.”
Dbt Labs has seen its user-base grow quickly since its previous funding rounds: the company has 5,500 companies using the product, compared with 3,100 in November and 1,600 last April.
The startup plans to rapidly scale its sales team “as quickly as we can,” Handy said, while looking at international markets and grappling with its fast growth. Dbt Labs has 120 employees, and Handy expects the figure to grow to 180 by the end of 2021 and possibly more than 250 at the end of next year. The company had 16 employees at the start of 2020.
Hiring is expected to happen across the board, from sales teams to product and engineering and the company wants to be well-staffed before taking on more clients.
“There's just so much work to do to fully take advantage of the moment of time that we're in,” Handy said.
Dbt Labs ushered in a rebrand with the announcement of the Series C. The company changed its name to reflect its product, despite Handy’s fondness for the Fishtown Analytics moniker that the startup has had since its founding in 2016. When going on a sales call for dbt, clients would get thrown off by the difference between the product and the company, Handy said.
“The line that somebody said to me was, ‘You can only rent so much space in people's heads,’” he said. “And so I think this is just about approaching the market in a way that makes a little bit more sense to everybody.”
