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Last September, Databricks raised more than $500m in a Series I funding round, valuing the company at $43bn.
Databricks has agreed to acquire Tabular, the data management company, in a deal valued at between $1bn and $2bn, as reported by The Wall Street Journal yesterday (4 June).
Founded by former Netflix employees Ryan Blue, Dan Weeks and Jason Reid, Tabular is a Silicon Valley start-up that helps optimise data stored in the cloud.
Databricks hopes that through the acquisition the company can improve data compatibility for clients so that they are “no longer limited” by which lakehouse format their data is in.
“Databricks pioneered the lakehouse and over the past four years, the world has embraced the lakehouse architecture, combining the best of data warehouses and data lakes to help customers decrease TCO, embrace openness and deliver on AI projects faster,” said Ali Ghodsi, CEO and co-founder of Databricks.
According to Ghodsi, lakehouse – an open data management architecture – has been split between the two most popular formats: Delta Lake and Iceberg. “Databricks and Tabular will work with the open-source community to bring the two formats closer to each other over time, increasing openness, and reducing silos and friction for customers.”
“We created Apache Iceberg to solve critical data challenges around correctness, performance and scalability,” said Ryan Blue, CEO and co-founder at Tabular.
“It’s been amazing to see both Iceberg and Delta Lake grow massively in popularity, largely fuelled by the open lakehouse becoming the industry standard. With Tabular joining Databricks, we intend to build the best data management platform based on open lakehouse formats so that companies don’t have to worry about picking the ‘right’ format or getting locked into proprietary data formats.”
Based in San Francisco, Databricks was founded in 2013 by the creators of Apache Spark, an open-source analytics engine for large-scale data processing. Databricks makes AI software for building, testing and deploying machine learning and analytics applications.
It raised $1.6bn three years ago at a valuation of $38bn, becoming one of the many ‘decacorn’ start-ups in 2021. In September last year, it raised more than $500m in a Series I funding round, valuing the company at $43bn. It was backed by T Rowe Price, Morgan Stanley, Fidelity, Franklin Templeton, Capital One Ventures, Nvidia, Andreessen Horowitz and Tiger Global.
According to the company, more than 10,000 organisations around the world – including Block, Comcast, Condé Nast, Rivian, Shell and more than 60pc of Fortune 500 companies – rely on its AI-powered data intelligence platform.
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