Welcome to Daco

Managing data products across teams is rarely a technical bottleneck. Instead, it is a synchronization bottleneck. Most teams spend more time aligning definitions and expectations than they do actually shipping value.

We have lived this friction firsthand, and it is why we are building Daco.

The Friction of Misalignment

Daco started with two engineers, Giuseppe Grieco and Guðmundur Orri Pálsson, who spent years working side by side. Coming from software engineering backgrounds, we noticed a recurring gap: data lacks the development standards that make software scalable.

Without a shared source of truth for definitions, teams fall into a few common traps:

• Definition Drift: There is constant back and forth just to agree on what a specific column or metric represents across different business units.
• Manual Porting: The same data definition has to be manually rewritten for SQL warehouses, dbt models, and Pydantic schemas.
• System Fragility: Every time a tool or schema changes, the manual bridges between systems break. This requires another round of fixes and alignment.

Data teams do not need more meetings. They need better development tools that make alignment the path of least resistance.

What is Daco?

Daco is a development tool built to speed up data teams by treating data definitions as code. It acts as a shared interface for your data products, allowing you to:

• Define schemas and expectations in a single, version controlled place.
• Sync those definitions automatically into the tools you already use, like dbt, SQL, or Python.
• Standardize how teams interact with data products through a unified specification.

At the core of this is OpenDPI (Open Data Product Interface). Think of it as the OpenAPI equivalent for the data world: a vendor neutral standard for defining what a data product actually is.

Building in the Open

We chose to build Daco as an open source project because data is not used in a vacuum. Analysts, engineers, and scientists all see data through different lenses, and a standard only works if it is shaped by the people using it. Our focus is on building a community of contributors who believe that data definitions should be as portable and reliable as software code.

Join Us

We are in the early stages and would love for you to try out the tools and share your feedback.

• The Standard: Explore OpenDPI on GitHub.
• The Tooling: Check out our CLI tool.
• The Vision: Visit dacolabs.com for more documentation.

Stop syncing definitions by hand. Start building.

✨ The Daco Team

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Visit dacolabs.com to explore the OpenDPI specification, try the Daco CLI, and join our community.