The clearest recent example of consolidation joins the two products that defined the modern data stack's "E-L" and "T". Fivetran 16,237 , the managed ingestion service, and dbt 37,942 Labs, the company behind dbt, announced an all-stock merger on 13 October 2025 and completed it on 1 June 2026. The combined company initially operates as "Fivetran + dbt Labs", with Fivetran's George Fraser as chief executive and dbt Labs' founder Tristan Handy as president, and says it supports more than 100,000 data teams.
Two details matter for practitioners. First, the completion announcement released the runtime of dbt's Rust-based Fusion engine as dbt Core v2.0 under the Apache 2.0 license, so the open-source core remains open (dbt Fusion and SQLMesh covers Fusion and its separately licensed tooling). Second, the companies position the merged platform around supplying governed data and business context to AI agents; at dbt Summit on 16 September 2026 they announced further joint "agent-ready" capabilities.
What should you take from it? Ingestion and transformation, once separate purchases, are now sold together, much as warehouses absorbed BI features before them. Skills transfer: SQL modeling with dbt works the same whichever company sells it, and this book teaches dbt on PostgreSQL 1,289 and DuckDB 61,228 (Transforming Data with dbt) without any paid service. When you evaluate tools, check who owns them, how they are licensed, and how easily you could leave.