Samuel Beckett Bridge, Dublin. Image: © Only Fabrizio/Stock.adobe.com
First it was OpenAI, then Anthropic. And now, one of the hottest US data start-ups valued at $4.2bn has also decided to call Dublin its first entry to Europe.
Dublin seems to be the favourite city in Europe for US tech giants looking for a base in the continent. In recent years, it has also become somewhat of a haven for smaller, prodigious start-ups thanks to its thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem and abundance of tech talent.
Home to universities churning out job-ready graduates every year, state-supported infrastructure to welcome foreign business and grow domestic enterprise, and one of the highest standards of living in the world, Dublin makes a compelling case.
“When you step back and say across all the cities across Europe, where would you want to place that talent? One of those is certainly Dublin,” says Brandon Sweeney, president and chief operating officer of DBT Labs, who is on a visit to Dublin this week to open the Philadelphia-based data start-up’s first European hub here.
DBT Labs joins a growing list of high-value US start-ups choosing to base teams in Dublin as an entry-point to the EU, the most recent of which were OpenAI and Anthropic – two of the world’s leading AI start-ups.
Last September, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the company chose Ireland because it “blends a talented workforce with support for innovation and responsible business growth”. Anthropic had similar reasons – diverse talent, thriving start-ups and a concentration of major tech firms.
Gateway to Europe
Backed by the likes of Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital, DBT Labs (formerly known as Fishtown Analytics) was valued at $4.2bn in 2022. It was co-founded by CEO Tristan Handy in 2016 as a modern open-source analytics workflow platform that is today used by more than 40,000 companies around the world.
“We already had a concentration of certain employees here [in Dublin], and we said let’s double down because, for one, we’ve attracted some great talent here. Some really seasoned, smart and hard-working people who really epitomise the DBT Labs culture and want to help our customers,” adds Sweeney, a former VMware and HashiCorp executive who joined the start-up in November.
“And then you’re like, ‘hey, let’s go do the right thing by them and let’s go create a facility where they can come together and learn from each other, get better and host our customers’. And right here in Dublin is the place to do it. Super innovative city… There are a ton of tech companies that have the type of talent that ultimately, we’ll want to recruit and help scale up.”
Dublin marks the first European expansion for DBT Labs and will be the start-up’s main hub in the continent, particularly for its EMEA sales team. While headquartered in Philadelphia, it also has offices in San Francisco, New York and Austin.
But the story doesn’t end at just having a new office in the Docklands. Sweeney said the start-up also has plans to hire more staff to its Dublin hub soon.
“What we’re also pretty excited about in Dublin is language capability. As we look to scale into and across Europe, obviously language matters as we start to capture key leading customers in each of the countries that we look to go build direct operations in and we’re going to do that based out of Dublin here,” he says.
“Over time, I hope we can ultimately export some teams where people want to grow their careers if they want to move back into their different countries where they have language proficiency and fluency. We’d love to support that.”
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