Dbt Labs is weighing the possibility of going public after raising a $222 million Series D.
The Philadelphia data analytics startup raised its Series D less than nine months after securing a $150 million Series C round last June. Dbt Labs CEO Tristan Handy said at that time that the company’s next funding round could be its last before going public, and an initial public offering remains on the table for the future.
Handy told the Business Journal on Thursday that he’s been taking cues from his Chief Financial Officer Daniel Le, a former finance executive at Zoom, on when and whether dbt Labs will pursue an IPO.
“We want to retain our optionality around how long we stay private, how the road looks for us,” Handy said.
The Series D lifted dbt Labs’ valuation to $4.2 billion, making the company the second-highest valued startup in Greater Philadelphia behind Gopuff. The startup could have raised even more, Handy said. Dbt Labs was in talks to raise capital at a valuation of $6 billion, Forbes reported.
The CEO doesn’t see the startup’s valuation as a measure of its success. Rather, he sees it as a sign that dbt Labs has much more work to do.
“Honestly, I take it very seriously — very much as an obligation and not as some flag we plant in the ground that everyone gets to celebrate,” he said.
Dbt Labs is seeking to increase its headcount from 225 to 500 employees by the end of 2022, Handy said. The firm had just 16 employees at the start of 2020. Dbt Labs will largely hire for remote positions based in North America, as well as for smaller teams based in Europe and the Asia/Pacific regions, he said.
The startup is also considering opening new satellite offices so it can bring together teams for in-person meetings. There are no concrete plans for those offices, and the firm is looking at spaces in San Francisco and Austin — locations based on how many employees are in proximity to those cities, Handy said. Dbt Labs will maintain its headquarters at 915 Spring Garden St. in Philadelphia, but the office has functioned on an as-needed basis for meeting space.
The Series D funding will also be used to handle the capacity of its rapidly-growing user base, which has ballooned to 25,000 data professionals — about double the size of dbt Labs’ community last year, Handy said.
Dbt Labs works with more than 9,000 companies. Clients are using its products in more sophisticated ways than they have in the past, and they are increasingly demanding additional features and partnerships with existing business intelligence tools, he said.
“Our community is now so large and so influential that when we released this thing, there are people actively pounding on the doors of their BI partners to say, ‘You’ve got to support this,’” Handy said.
