Databricks Makes Power Move: Acquires $900M-Backed Machine Learning Unicorn Tecton

Databricks just dropped nearly a billion dollars to dominate the ML infrastructure space—and Wall Street's already pricing in the 'synergies.'

The AI Arms Race Escalates

Databricks isn't playing around. Snatching up Tecton—a machine learning startup with a whopping $900 million backing—signals one thing: they're going all-in on enterprise AI. This acquisition puts them squarely against Snowflake and Google in the battle for data platform supremacy.

Why This Deal Rocks the Sector

Tecton's feature store technology lets companies deploy machine learning models faster than ever. Think real-time fraud detection, hyper-personalized recommendations, and predictive analytics that actually work. Databricks just bought the missing piece in their AI stack—and competitors are scrambling.

The Bottom Line

While VCs celebrate another exit, enterprise customers win with tighter integration between data and AI. But let's be real—this acquisition's real genius is how efficiently it transfers $900 million of venture capital into Databricks' valuation. The machine learning? That's just the cover story.

Databricks targets real-time AI agents with Tecton deal

Tecton wasn’t just some outside partner. It already had ties with Databricks. In 2022, Tecton announced official partnerships with both Databricks and rival Snowflake, and since then, both of those companies have invested in Tecton.

Many of Tecton’s users, including Coinbase, already use Databricks services in their AI stack. Now Databricks wants to tighten that loop. Ghodsi said Tecton’s software and team will help scale up Agent Bricks, which is the company’s product for building and automating workflows with AI agents.

Speed is the goal. “It’s really the real-time building block to feed real-time information into the agents,” he said. He explained that things like voice-based AI systems require instant feedback. “Many of the use cases are directly user-facing and human-facing, and humans hate to wait.”

Tecton was founded in 2020 by engineers who used to work at Uber. These engineers helped build Michelangelo, the internal AI system Uber uses to run features like real-time pricing.

That experience turned into a commercial product focused on helping other companies serve AI systems that need fast, live data. Since launching, Tecton raised $160 million from backers like Andreessen Horowitz and Bain Capital Ventures.

But it didn’t go public or get acquired, until now. The company stayed private while building out a solid user base, with enterprise customers already putting its tools into real-world AI systems.

The new deal doesn’t say what happens to Tecton’s product line, but the clear signal is that its technology and engineers are now going to be absorbed into Databricks’ AI platform.

Databricks is making these acquisitions on the back of a growing valuation. Just this week, the company said it signed a term sheet for a fresh funding round at over $100 billion, a jump of more than 60% from eight months ago.

That gives Databricks the ability to issue more private shares and keep buying startups that strengthen its AI muscle.

This year alone, they’ve bought Neon, a serverless database startup, for $1 billion, and Tabular, which brings in the creators of the Apache Iceberg data format. Last year, they paid $1.3 billion for MosaicML, a generative AI platform.

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