Databricks Inc.’s announcement Monday of a deal to acquire machine learning startup Tecton could turbocharge its artificial intelligence (AI) agents portfolio and full-scale AI building tools for enterprise customers.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Tecton, backed by venture capital giants Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins, was last valued at $900 million in 2022. The 5-year-old startup, which employs 90, was founded by ex-Uber Technologies Inc. engineers.
“It’s really the real-time building block to feed real-time information into the agents,” Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi said in an interview with Reuters. “Many of the use cases are directly user-facing and human-facing, and humans hate to wait.”
Ghodsi added that Tecton will help Databricks expand its flagship product, AgentBricks, which automates workflows with AI agents.
The acquisition — designed to reduce response times in AI applications, a priority for customers building interactive services — would be the latest in a shopping spree for Databricks. The AI company snapped up MosaicML, an open source startup with neural networks expertise, for $1.3 billion, in 2023; Neon Inc., a serverless database company, for $1 billion in May; and Tabular, a data-management company, in 2024.
Databricks and Tecton share close ties. They partnered with rival Snowflake Inc. in 2022. Databricks and Snowflake have also invested in Tecton.
Last week, Databricks announced a funding round that gave it a market valuation of $100 billion.
“The finance team tells me to not use this term, but I think Databricks has a shot to be a trillion-dollar company,” Ghodsi told the Wall Street Journal. “But we have a lot of work ahead of us to get there.”
