We are thrilled to share that Transform has entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by dbt Labs. This is a big step towards our mission to make data more accessible. Together, we have an incredible opportunity to bring MetricFlow to dbt’s thriving community of Analytics Engineers. We have long believed that semantics and data transformation belong tightly coupled. There is no better way than to achieve that vision than to join our best-in-breed technologies.
We first met Tristan and Drew in 2021 and quickly built admiration for their leadership and ambition. When they first shared their plans to build a semantic layer, we can’t say that we weren’t a little scared! dbt Labs builds products that are loved. At the same time, as product people, we couldn’t help but feel validated that metrics-centric tooling is the future.
We invested in that relationship while building our product, confident that we were creating something valuable. Since we started working on our initial dbt integrations in 2021, we understood the immense power in defining data lineage across the entire journey—from ingestion, through transformation, and into consumption. We have long talked about the challenges and trade-offs that data analysts face with trust in data and the productivity tax of working in brittle systems. The tight relationship of tools is the *best* way to address these broad problems and empower analysts to build better, more informed organizations.
We now have the challenge—and opportunity—to convince the ecosystem of data visualization, business intelligence, data quality, experimentation, reverse ELT, and other tools to unify their metric logic onto a single, open standard for semantic modeling. Success here and commitment from the entire industry to this future will take work.
But this isn’t just about data—it’s about people. There are many people who have already chosen to see the future. The team at dbt haven’t only been wonderful collaborators since we first met them. As our conversations unfolded, it became clear that beyond sharing a passion for building great products, we have the same core values around leading with authentic human empathy. It isn’t often that organizations have so much in common in how they value the contributions of their people and nurture the growth of individuals at work. This alignment across values and vision made this future possible.
To our customers—nearly all of whom are already dbt users—thank you for trusting us. This will only allow us to build even better products for you. For any immediate questions, here’s a link to an FAQ.
To our investors—thank you for supporting us and helping us navigate from an idea to this new chapter. We’re grateful that you believed in us and always acted in our interest.
To the dbt team—we can’t wait to build the future of data with you all and have lots of fun along the way.
To the innovators behind Minerva and Metric Repo at Airbnb, Lauren, Amit, Cristian, Robert, Jonathan, Aaron, and more—we are so grateful for all of the ideas that you contributed to these projects. Much of our inspiration is derived from you and your brilliant work. Thank you for being amazing colleagues and encouraging us to bring this product to a broader audience.
To our team—we could not have asked for a better group of people to build this company. This has been a wonderful and rewarding experience that we will forever be most grateful to you all for making possible.
Thanks,
Nick, James, and Paul