Tristan Handy

Tristan Handy is the founder of dbt Labs and, since June 2026, president of the combined Fivetran and dbt Labs, formed when Fivetran completed its acquisition of dbt Labs in an all-stock merger. Handy built dbt (the 'data build tool') out of Fishtown Analytics, the small data consultancy he ran after leaving RJMetrics and Squarespace, releasing it as open source in 2016 to solve a problem he saw repeatedly with clients: SQL-based data transformation had no equivalent of the software engineering discipline — version control, testing, modularity — that application developers took for granted.

dbt introduced the concept of 'analytics engineering', letting data teams write transformations as version-controlled, testable SQL models rather than tangled stored procedures or opaque BI-tool logic. The open-source project found rapid adoption among data teams at companies of every size, and Fishtown Analytics rebranded as dbt Labs in 2019 as Handy pivoted the business toward a commercial product, dbt Cloud, built around the open-source core.

Under Handy's leadership, dbt Labs raised successive funding rounds from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, reaching a $4.2 billion valuation in its February 2022 Series D. The company became a fixture of the modern data stack alongside warehouses such as Snowflake and BigQuery, and dbt's SQL-modelling approach was widely imitated across the industry. In 2025, dbt Labs introduced Fusion, a new engine aimed at bringing faster, more deeply integrated transformation and AI-agent support to the platform.

The October 2025 announcement that Fivetran, the data-ingestion company, would acquire dbt Labs closed in June 2026, uniting the two most widely used tools in the modern data pipeline — extraction/loading and transformation — under one roof, explicitly positioned by both companies as infrastructure for building 'trusted' data for AI agents. Handy took the role of president of the merged company, with Fivetran's George Fraser remaining chief executive.

Handy has also been an outspoken commentator on the data industry through his essays and the dbt Labs blog, shaping much of the vocabulary — 'analytics engineer', 'the modern data stack' — that practitioners now use as a matter of course. His path from a two-person consultancy to a multi-billion-dollar merger is frequently cited as a model for open-source-led enterprise software growth.