The red hot data startup had initially planned to close its Series D at a $6.2 billion valuation, says CEO Tristan Handy. The stock market led him to reassess.
Dbt Labs cofounder and CEO Tristan Handy had lined up a slate of the top crossover funds to invest in his company at a $6.2 billion valuation when tech stocks took a sudden nosedive in January. As late stage venture investors reassessed the lofty valuations they were handing out, Handy slashed his own target by nearly one-third.
“The investors were ready,” Handy says. “It's that we have another set of stakeholders that we care about: the employees.” Employees can cash out on stock options if a startup goes public, but with tech stocks sinking, a valuation too high now could result in a lower payout upon IPO, he noted.
Along the way, Handy’s team built an internal “data build tool” to improve the productivity of their consulting work. The tool piped in the many disparate types of raw data pouring in from across the cloud, and democratized them so that they could be used for analytics. Consulting clients soon took notice of the internal tool, which Fishtown Analytics had made open source. By 2019, more than 1,000 businesses had adopted it and large enterprises began to call up Handy.
The latest capital injection will help Dbt Labs continue to scale up and meet growing demand, particularly abroad . Now, Handy is looking towards building new software tools, namely one for standardizing business metrics. “The experience of a data professional today leaves a lot to be desired,” he says. “Instead of having a conversation about last month's business performance, you end up talking about technical details, like how my revenue number differs from your revenue number.