Turntable

Wally Gurzynski, Justin Leder and Ian Tracey founded Turntable in late 2022/early 2023 after repeatedly encountering data-pipeline bottlenecks at Twitter, Cruise, Pinterest and Stripe. The original YC W23 product was a generative-AI copilot for dbt Core that generated and modified model code, schema files and documentation. It evolved into a local-first/collaborative data IDE for building, deploying and monitoring reporting stacks using dbt Core, SQLMesh or plain SQL, with column-level lineage, metadata cataloging, multiplayer projects, query previews, data-quality monitoring and virtual data branches. The team targeted analytics engineers, data engineers, data scientists and increasingly technical analysts; an early attempt to enable less-technical analysts was narrowed after customers signaled that purchase authority and demand sat with technical users. Founder Wally Gurzynski stepped down as CEO in March 2024 and remained an advisor while Ian Tracey took over leadership. Gurzynski reported that the dbt Core extension ran on more than 2,000 machines at organizations ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies. A 2025 public support discussion said lineage, documentation UI, query preview and language-server functionality ran locally, with only optional AI documentation generation sent to a server—a meaningful enterprise-security differentiator. Ian Tracey left for Ramp in 2025 and announced in December that, after nearly three years, Turntable would open-source its plugins, core SQL editor, lineage algorithms and supporting libraries in early 2026. YC now marks the company inactive and all three founders former. Its legacy marketing page still advertises early access and prominent logos, but this is not evidence that the hosted business remains operational. Public financing data are thin: YC's W23 standard investment was $500,000 under two linked SAFE instruments (not two operating rounds), and Crunchbase identifies Liquid 2 Ventures as the other investor; no reliable amount beyond $500,000 or priced-round valuation was found. Risks included crowded modern-data-stack procurement, competition from dbt Cloud and VS Code extensions/AI IDEs, handling sensitive schema/metadata, dependence on dbt/warehouse APIs, an unclear path from popular free extension to durable revenue, and founder/team departures.

Founding story

Justin Leder said his Cruise data-science team spent roughly 70% of its time managing dbt pipelines; Ian Tracey built internal data tools at Pinterest and Stripe; Wally Gurzynski's Twitter product/ML teams were blocked by slow metric and pipeline creation. They saw generative AI as an opening to rebuild analytics engineering workflows.

Business model

Developer/data-team SaaS and IDE extension layered on open-source transformation tools and customer data warehouses.

Free individual/extension adoption with intended paid team or enterprise collaboration, governance and support; historical pricing and realized revenue were not publicly disclosed.

Traction

By March 2024 the dbt Core extension ran on 2,000+ machines and was used by data teams from startups to Fortune 500 companies. The marketing site displays organizations including Grab, Miinto, Louis Vuitton, The Atlantic, Gopuff, Braze, Wayfair, Xero, HubSpot and Pave, but the exact relationship and paid-customer status of each logo are unverified.

Latest developments

Ian Tracey announced in December 2025 that Turntable's plugins, core SQL editor, lineage algorithms and supporting libraries would be open-sourced in early 2026. YC now marks the company inactive, notwithstanding the still-live legacy marketing page.