Newly Merged Dbt Labs And Fivetran Ready Channel Plans For AI Data Push

The newly created company, as yet unnamed, looks to be a force in the exploding AI data infrastructure arena with its combined data transformation and data integration technologies.

The new company created through the recent merger of dbt Labs and Fivetran may not have a new name yet, but it’s already making some significant moves around its channel operations.

Dbt Labs, a leading player in the data transformation technology space, is holding its “dbt Summit” in Las Vegas this week where executives are providing the first look at plans to merge the dbt Labs and Fivetran partner programs, including launching a new partner tier system and offering a unified partner portal, in February 2027.

Dbt Labs executives, including Shawn Toldo, vice president of the company’s worldwide partner organization, also outlined several more immediate moves the newly combined company is making around deal registration, reporting and enablement designed to simplify and improve the partner experience.

All this as dbt Labs and Fivetran executives press home the message that the newly combined company will provide partners with huge opportunities in the AI data infrastructure market. (The big data infrastructure market, overall, reached $253.6 billion in 2025, according to market researcher The Business Research Company.)

“Trusted data at scale, at an optimized cost, is going to drive reliable agentic activity with a high ROI for customers,” Toldo said in a pre-dbt Summit interview with CRN, summarizing the overarching theme for the event.

That resonates with David Gelman, executive vice president of data and AI at Brooklyn Data, a data consulting and integration service company that is a long-time partner of both dbt Labs and Fivetran. Gelman, in an interview with CRN, said Brooklyn Data is especially focused on agentic AI system buildouts for clients.

“I think people have acknowledged that you can’t have an AI strategy without a data strategy,” he said.

Dbt Labs, headquartered in Philadelphia, is a leading provider of software used to transform data inside data platforms and data warehouses. Fivetran, based in Oakland, California, provides an automated data movement platform with more than 700 connectors used to collect data from a wide range of sources and move it to centralized data warehouses or data lakes.

Data transformation and data movement are critical steps in collecting and preparing data for business analytics and, more recently, for use by AI applications and agents.

Nearly one year ago, dbt Labs and Fivetran announced a plan to merge and create a new powerhouse player in the market for open data infrastructure—the data management technology “stack” that supports data analytics and AI systems.

The merger, completed June 1, was accomplished through a pooling of the shares of the private equity companies that owned the two companies with venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz a major investor in both.

The new company doesn’t have a name yet—it’s currently operating as “Fivetran + dbt Labs.” Fivetran CEO George Fraser is CEO of the new entity while dbt Labs founder and CEO Tristan Handy (pictured speaking at this week’s dbt Summit) is serving as president.

Handy, in an interview with CRN, said the new company is now operating under a single board and leadership team and has largely completed the tasks of combining internal systems and processes, such as human resource management and benefits. Toldo said the dbt Labs and Fivetran partner teams have been brought together in a process that began Aug. 3.

Handy said other customer-facing sales, marketing and solutions architecture organizations are set to be integrated during the first half of next year in conjunction with the start of the company’s fiscal 2027 on Feb. 1.

“I think that will be really meaningful for the company because we want everybody to be selling the entire suite of products, because it’s just good for the culture of the company to [have] everybody on the same team and aligned and everything,” Handy said.

The dbt Labs-Fivetran Technology Combination

Because the two companies’ technologies already work together at the platform level, there is no need for a major integration of the dbt Labs and Fivetran product lines, Handy said. “But there are a million small ways that, over time, you can bring those [data transformation and data connectivity] products together and you can start to create something that is bigger than those two product categories ever were.”

One such example discussed at the dbt Summit is allowing the dbt Labs platform to leverage the Apache Polaris open data table formats utilized by Fivetran’s Managed Data Lake Service to speed up “transformations compute” operations—a benefit of having an open data infrastructure, Handy said.

Dbt Labs and Fivetran “were companies built around single, very successful products,” Handy said. “In the world of AI and agents, what is required more than ever is a platform approach where you can treat the different components of the platform like Lego bricks. And you can easily ask your agents to combine them.”

Handy noted that the volume of “non-human” agentic traffic on the Internet now exceeds “human” traffic, “and we really think that that is coming for data in the not very distant future.”

With a wave of AI agents—rather than people—asking analytical questions and seeking data, “the question for us is, how do we build the infrastructure that enables that to happen at every business in the world,” Handy said. “There is a need for an open, integrated data platform that considers agents as its first-class users.”

(At this week’s dbt Summit, the company announced the general availability of dbt v2 with a faster, more efficient Fusion processing engine. Also newly available is dbt State, a tool that optimizes data builds by only running models when their code or upstream data has changed, simplifying orchestration and allowing software engineers to iterate faster. The new Fivetran Context Layer, currently in private beta, unifies the data and metadata needed to give large language models and AI agents relevant context.)

Brooklyn Data’s Gelman said partners and clients will benefit from the “simplified go-to-market” through the dbt Labs and Fivetran merger and have fewer vendors to coordinate with. “And you have the increased power and reach of the joint partnership and sales teams,” he said.

On the technology side, partners and customers will benefit by having simpler data ETL/ELT (extract, transform and load/extract, load and transform) tooling and processes. And more tightly linking the dbt Labs and Fivetran platforms will reduce the complexities around context engineering and improve metadata and data lineage quality.

“I certainly foresee a future where it’s just a lot easier to operate and ingest the data and metadata required to enable agentic AI in particular,” Gelman said. “I think that they have an opportunity to do more with combined resources than they can do alone. This idea of having your [data] transformation layer be able to hook into your [data] ingestion layer natively—and not as another step that you have to take—is increasingly appealing in an AI-native development workflow.”

Channel Program Plans

On the channel operations side, the combined company is currently operating two partner programs with two partner portals, Toldo told CRN. Through October and November, the company will look for ways to “simplify the partner experience,” including improving partner enablement and streamlining co-selling efforts across the dbt Labs and Fivetran partner bases.

The company is also currently offering a virtual educational series to enable solution providers to deliver the dbt Labs-Fivetran platform.

With the merger of the two partner programs and partner portals, the company looks to create “an excellent partner experience” in terms of co-selling processes, deal registration and other facets of partner operations, Toldo said. That also includes “being simple and predictable” on what partners can expect in how the company operates with partners and providing predictability around working with the company’s sales organization.

The merged partner program will be built on a tiered system with partner capabilities and revenue contribution determining partner designations, the channel chief said.

The new company has more than 1,600 partners, with some overlap between the dbt Labs and Fivetran partner bases. Many are consultants, service providers and technology companies and Toldo said the number of resellers—currently small—will grow over time. The company is building out a global systems integrator ecosystem and continues to work with the major hyperscalers and leading data platform providers.

“We are committed to enabling sales, technical and delivery resources across these partner types,” Toldo said, “because they really need to be in a position to be predictable in their delivery.”

Brooklyn Data is currently a “Visionary,” the highest level of the dbt Labs program. Gelman said he’s looking for the new program to offer more self-service capabilities for partners and a streamlined certification/recertification process.

Generating excitement around the company’s open data infrastructure vision is a major goal.

“This AI and data world has really created an opportunity for us [and] also the partner ecosystem around us,” Toldo said. “If you think about the need for trusted data, the need for scale to really get the value out of AI use cases effectively, we can play a big role there with our open data infrastructure and our platform to help customers—through partners—get the most value possible out of their AI. Data is everything right now and having trust in it is the only way the AI piece works.”

Handy noted that a major benefit for solution providers is that AI technology and coding agents have significantly reduced the amount of time and labor needed for large-scale software migration projects. Such initiatives that previously took a year are now being completed in six weeks at just 10 percent of the cost, he said.

That could motivate organizations to finally undertake legacy IT migration projects that they once considered too disruptive and too costly, Handy said, noting that alone could create major opportunities for partners.

Beyond cost savings, AI will “reshape our operations and the value that we deliver to our customers,” Handy added, and that will require “outside-in” thinking. “And that is a huge area where a systems integrator can bring outside-in thinking and use the building blocks that companies like us give them in order to make that happen.”