The newly formed company created through the recent merger of dbt Labs and Fivetran will roll out a unified partner program and portal in February 2027, company executives revealed this week at the dbt Summit in Las Vegas. The still-unnamed entity, which combines leading data transformation and data integration technologies, is positioning itself as a major force in the AI data infrastructure market. The combined company now serves more than 1,600 partners, with some overlap between the two firms' existing partner bases, and plans to build its merged program around a tiered system where partner capabilities and revenue contribution determine designations.
According to the report, executives including Shawn Toldo, vice president of worldwide partner operations, outlined several immediate steps to simplify the partner experience through October and November, including improvements to deal registration, reporting, and enablement. The merger, which closed on June 1, was completed through a pooling of shares of the private equity companies that owned both firms, with venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz holding major stakes in each. Fivetran CEO George Fraser now leads the combined entity as CEO, while dbt Labs founder and CEO Tristan Handy serves as president. The big data infrastructure market overall reached $253.6 billion in 2025, according to market researcher The Business Research Company. Customer-facing sales, marketing, and solutions architecture teams are set to integrate during the first half of next year alongside the start of fiscal 2027 on February 1.
The report notes that the combined company is already operating under a single board and leadership team and has largely finished combining internal systems like human resource management and benefits. "Trusted data at scale, at an optimized cost, is going to drive reliable agentic activity with a high ROI for customers," Toldo stated in summarizing the event's theme. Handy emphasized that AI coding agents have dramatically reduced migration project timelines and costs, with initiatives that previously took a year now being completed in six weeks at just 10 percent of the cost. The company announced general availability of dbt v2 with a faster Fusion processing engine, along with dbt State, a tool that optimizes data builds by only running models when their code or upstream data has changed.
The merger creates opportunities for partners by simplifying go-to-market efforts and reducing the number of vendors clients need to coordinate with, according to David Gelman, executive vice president of data and AI at Brooklyn Data, a longtime partner of both companies. Because the two platforms already work together at the platform level, no major product integration is needed, though the company plans to create "a million small ways" to bring data transformation and data connectivity products together over time. One example involves allowing the dbt Labs platform to leverage Apache Polaris open data table formats from Fivetran's Managed Data Lake Service to speed up transformations compute operations. The report states that agentic AI system buildouts are driving demand, as the volume of non-human agentic traffic on the Internet now exceeds human traffic, and this trend is expected to reach data infrastructure "in the not very distant future." The company is building infrastructure that treats AI agents as first-class users, with the new Fivetran Context Layer, currently in private beta, unifying the data and metadata needed to give large language models and AI agents relevant context. For solution providers, reduced migration costs could motivate organizations to finally tackle legacy IT projects they once considered too disruptive and expensive, creating significant partnership opportunities. The channel's evolving role extends beyond implementation, as partners bring "outside-in thinking" to help clients reshape operations and maximize value from AI investments using the platform's building blocks.