A16Z-backed data firms Fivetran, dbt Labs to merge in all-stock deal (www.reuters.com)

A16Z-backed data integration firm Fivetran and analytics engineering leader dbt Labs agreed to merge in an all‑stock deal that will create a combined data infrastructure company with about $600 million in annual revenue. The transaction keeps Fivetran CEO Fraser at the helm and signals consolidation in the commercial data stack as investors and customers push for end‑to‑end solutions that simplify getting clean, transformed data into analytics and ML workflows. Technically, the merger pairs Fivetran’s automated data ingestion and pipeline orchestration capabilities with dbt’s transformation layer, model versioning and analytics engineering best practices—effectively unifying EL/ETL, transformation, and governance under one roof. For the AI/ML community this matters because faster, standardized pipelines reduce time to model‑ready data, improve reproducibility and lineage, and make it easier to operationalize feature engineering and data contracts for production models. The combined scale and cross‑product integration could also intensify competition with platforms like Snowflake, Databricks and cloud providers, and accelerate investments in observability, security and MLOps features tailored to AI workloads.