---
title: "One Line of Code Can Wipe a Billion Rows : Investing in Tobiko"
description: "Discover how Tobiko's data transformation tech helps startups cut cloud costs by 40% and build time by 80%. Key insights for data-driven founders."
categories: ["fundraising"]
keywords: ["Tobiko","data transformation","cloud cost reduction","data engineering tools","venture capital","SaaS","data lineage","DBT compatibility","data analytics","Theory Ventures"]
ai_summary: "Tobiko's tech reduces cloud costs by 40% and build time by 80% through efficient data transformations."
date: 2024-06-03
lastmod: 2026-07-30
canonical_url: https://www.tomtunguz.com/tobiko/
author: "Tomasz Tunguz"
---

![image](https://res.cloudinary.com/dzawgnnlr/image/upload/ayrmyiidy5vrpxpccovn.svg)
One line of software can impact a billion rows of data. 

A short SQL statement can [delete a table](https://xkcd.com/327/), reformat date into the US format, or compute the average quota attainment by account executive by region over a company's history. 

As data has become a critical component of analytics & production systems, data engineers require more sophisticated tools to manage their data transformations.

[Tobiko](https://tobikodata.com/) is that solution. 

Tobiko enables modern data transformations by calculating only what's needed. 

At small scale this may not seem important. But for [Harness](https://harness.io), this innovation saved [30-40% of their cloud data warehouse spend](https://tobikodata.com/harness.html) & reduced model build time by 80%. DreamHaven, a gaming company, found [Databricks's Delta Live Tables 3.5x more expensive than Tobiko](https://tobikodata.com/dreamhaven.html) to run the same pipelines. 

Existing systems recalculate too much because they don't understand data lineage & the relationships between tables. So they recalculate too much data to ensure correctness, substantially increasing data warehouse spend.

More than that, Tobiko enables data engineers to operate with the same discipline as software developers: creating development environments, [writing tests](https://tobikodata.com/pipe.html) to ensure code performs as intended, & simulating changes to ensure one line of code doesn't wipe a billion rows. 

Initially, [Pipe planned to have multiple Databricks environments ](https://tobikodata.com/dreamhaven.html): dev, prod, and staging. They wanted to segregate the data; however, with Tobiko’s architecture, they only needed one environment. This simplified their architecture & reduced cost.

Migration is straightforward : Tobiko's platform is DBT compatible out-of-the-box.

Tobiko is founded by a team from Airbnb, Netflix, Google, & Apple who have faced the challenges of scaling data infrastructure & developed tools to solve the problems they faced. 

We're excited to partner with Toby, Tyson, & Iaroslav by leading their Series A financing, alongside Unusual Ventures, Jordan Tigani from MotherDuck & George Fraser from FiveTran.

If you're interested to learn more about Tobiko & the modern way to shape data, [talk to the team here](https://tobikodata.com/?source=tomtunguz.com).