Fivetran and dbt Labs to merge - so what’s next?
As Fivetran acquires dbt Labs, there is considerable uncertainty on price and product. This makes Paradime's Cursor for Data now the largest vendor agnostic AI-native platform in the marke for data work. Should you move then?
Kaustav Mitra
Oct 13, 2025
·
5
min read
Today, finally the news became official that Fivetran and dbt Labs, Inc. are merging into a combined entity in an all stock deal broken by Reuters.
As per the article above, the combined entity would be making about $600M in ARR.
Upon closing, Fraser will serve as CEO of the combined company, while dbt Labs CEO Tristan Handy will become co-founder and president.
This is probably one of the most significant news in the data analytics market today or this year.
The Consolidation Play
Fivetran started as a data integration business moving data from various sources to the data warehouse. dbt Labs, Inc. were the founders of dbt™, which is now the most widely used tool for data transformation.
However, dbt Labs, always had a problem - their open source product was too good to be in the open - it was the biggest competitor to dbt Cloud™. They had given so much value away early on in dbt Core™ that it was very hard to turn back. Apart from that, I have always said this, dbt Labs had its roots in consulting not product. As a result, outside of dbt Core™, their other products just weren’t that good - semantic layer was a failure until Snowflake decided to make the open semantic interface, and the SDF acquisition was supposed to rekindle some of the spark to the developer experience. They never experimented with pricing or packaging. They never invested in AI. They are very good at telling a marketing story but they’ve always struggled with building products outside of dbt Core™.
But the real genius or diabolical outcome of this was how Fivetran first acquired Census, then Tobiko, essentially killing all dbt Core™ competition and then merging with dbt Labs. So that there is just one combined entity in the market.
We now have the next Informatica 😅.
On their own, IMHO, neither entity would have exited into an IPO. I was clear to me that there is a huge crystallization of loss for current investors of dbt Labs. But nobody would admit that, because it then makes the loss real. However, together, it gives the investors and employees of both have an exit outcome, which I think is great.
What about Paradime?
This makes Paradime the largest vendor agnostic platform in the market to code and run data pipelines for analytics and AI.
We are now Cursor for Data, the agentic data engineering platform.
We have competed hard, and fair and have worked through one battle after another in various different ways. And we have persisted.
When we started, we heard from investors, dbt™ will ultimately find their way and we will die - and I maintained building a product and coming from consulting are very different things. We’ve heard from sales and marketing consultants, to tone down our messaging because dbt™ is the largest and we will never be bigger. I was right - it's good to be right sometimes.
We listened to our users, kept building the product and kept acquiring customers while keeping a very high signal to noise ratio.
With tenacity, grit, perseverance, and hard work, staying in the game is more powerful than fading like a shooting star.
Are You Currently Using dbt Cloud™?
If you are a current dbt Cloud™ customer, the days for you to have a grandfathered contract is going to be over soon and your contract will get re-priced very soon. Fivetran is way better at this than dbt Cloud™ reps have ever been. So this is definitely the time to consider alternatives and not be stuck.
There is also uncertainty over which dbt Cloud™ products will stay or get removed. So now is the time to hedge your bets and figure out a strategy to prevent disruptions within your organization.
We’ve had customers that saw ahead and have moved to Paradime, with up to 1.5yrs of dbt Cloud™ contract left.
We can move you to Paradime super fast - it takes less than 30mins to move all your setup and go live takes less than 5 days. Your dbt Cloud™ cost might even drop in the process.
Why Choose Paradime?
In the last 12 months, 91% of organizations, who have evaluated both dbt Cloud™ and Paradime, have chosen Paradime.
This is driven by a few factors:
We are AI-native and as a result our customers see significant productivity gains from using Paradime - 10X improvement in coding velocity and 70% reduction in MTTR.
We support unlimited workspaces, and unlimited model builds, which means your cost is always predictable.
We have startups (e.g. Rox, Metropolis, Customer.io, Motive) and Enterprises (e.g. Bill.com) using Paradime to build, and run their data pipelines everyday.
We have a 5min first response time and our support is top notch.
We’ve had a 100% uptime in the last 365 days i.e. we have a rock-solid platform
How Does Paradime Compare with dbt Cloud™?
Paradime has complete feature parity and a lot more. You can read our blog post on Paradime vs dbt Cloud™ to get a deeper understanding. In addition, our DinoAI increases development speed by 10X. As a result, we help Paradime customers move faster every day. Most recently, users are able to trigger even Fivetran syncs and ingestion pipelines from Paradime.
So if you are running a data team (of any size), and want a best-in-class data platform, we can help you and the time to start thinking is now.
Just reach out to us at support@paradime.io to schedule a demo or DM me on LinkedIn or email me at kaustav@paradimehq.com - and we will take care of the rest.
