Follow Datanami:
November 11, 2020

Data Transformer Fishtown Raises Funds

(ProStockStudio/Shutterstock)

Fishtown Analytics, the data engineering tool startup, announced a $29.5 funding round this week to be used for further development of its open source analytics engineering tool.

The Series B round was led by Sequoia Capital along with existing investors Andreesen Horowitz and Amplify Partners. Matt Miller, a Sequoia partner, is joining Fishtown’s board.

The Philadelphia-based startup formed in 2016 previously raised $12.9 million in an earlier funding round.

Fishtown Analytics’ Data Build Tool, or dbt, handles the “T” in ETL (it doesn’t do extraction or loading), enabling reusable data transformation workflows to be created using SQL.

The analytics engineering framework seeks to take advantage of the opening created by cloud data warehouses, investors said, coming up with a new transform data “with the elegance of code.”

The analytics engineering framework produced and maintains “analytics code” using software development best practices. The approach to data transformation applies the dbt analytics engineering workflow to prep “raw data into consumable information and business logic,” the startup said Wednesday (Nov. 11) in announcing its latest funding round.

Companies currently find themselves increasingly reliant on data engineers to construct pipelines needed to move data sets from where they are created into systems where data can be processed. Commonly referred to as extract, transform, and load, or ELT, the data is transformed after it’s loaded, which is often the case in cloud data warehouse. That analytics task hasn’t changed much over the least two decades.

Fishtown and Fivetran are among the early developers of platforms that allow customers to more easily transform and load data into cloud data warehouses. Fivetran recently unveiled a pay-as-go option for its ETL service connecting to cloud data warehouses such as Amazon Web Services’ RedShift, Google Cloud BigQuery and Snowflake.

Fivetran recently released an integration with dbt.

Fishtown claims about 3,000 customers using dbt each week, with 490 paying customers for dbt Cloud. JetBlue Airways, an early customer, said it is using the new workflow with dbt and the Snowflake cloud data warehouse to upgrade its data analytics operations.

“Organizations large and small continue to face tremendous challenges organizing data and making it available to decision-makers,” said Fishtown Analytics CEO, Tristan Handy. “We’re going to continue building higher-leverage analytics engineering tooling, better career paths and a community of practice with deep social capital.”

Recent items:

Running Sideline to Sideline with Big Data

Data Lakes Are Legacy Tech, Fivetran CEO Says

What is a Data Cloud? And 11 Other Snowflake Enhancements

Datanami