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SDF Labs’ co-founders, from left: Michael Levin, Elias DeFaria, Lukas Schulte, and Wolfram Schulte.
Philadelphia-based data development company dbt Labs announced the acquisition of SDF Labs, a Seattle startup that helps companies manage their enterprise data warehouse systems.
Founded in 2022, SDF Labs emerged last year with software that analyzes SQL code and provides insight into how data is being moved across various warehouses, flagging potential errors or bugs in the process.
In a blog post, dbt Labs’ CEO Tristan Handy described SDF’s SQL parsing capabilities as a “step function change” that will “enable meaningful improvements to the dbt developer experience.”
dbt Labs, which describes itself as a pioneer in analytics engineering, raised $222 million in 2022 at a $4.2 billion valuation.
SDF raised $9 million in seed funding. The company was founded by CEO Lukas Schulte and his father, Wolfram Schulte, who spent more than 17 years at Microsoft as an engineering leader, and was most recently a principal architect at Meta, working on data warehouse infrastructure.
Lukas Schulte previously led engineering at PiñataFarms, a Los Angeles startup that builds consumer creative video tools.
Other co-founders include Michael Levin, who also spent time at Microsoft and Meta, and Elias DeFaria, a founding engineer at PiñataFarms who previously co-founded a music streaming platform.
The company’s investors include Seattle-based Founders’ Co-op; RTP Global; Two Sigma Ventures; Sequoia; and Andreessen Horowitz.
“While dbt’s capabilities are so comprehensive as to drive an entire ecosystem, it has historically been limited in one fundamental way: dbt only understands SQL statements only as a series of strings,” Lukas Schulte wrote on LinkedIn. “Today, that changes. We anticipate bringing the full suite of SDF’s static analysis capabilities, speed, and scalability into the dbt ecosystem.”
