At Databricks’ recent year-end offsite in Napa, CEO Ali Ghodsi said members of the company’s research team were “banging on the table” encouraging Ghodsi to acquire AI data platform Lilac AI.
“They were already using it and they were very stoked,” said Ghodsi. Less than a week later, he was putting the final touches on his plan to buy the startup, which was founded by a group of Google Software engineers less than a year earlier.
“It was a no brainer,” said Ghodsi of the acquisition, “they were interested, we were interested, you know, this was a love marriage.”
Ghodsi declined to say how much Databricks is paying for the company.
It’s just the latest in an AI spending spree for Databricks. The company made headlines in 2023 with its $1.3 billion purchase of generative AI startup MosaicML. One of the largest AI acquisitions to date, the deal was orchestrated over dinner at an AI conference in San Francisco and similarly came together in about a week.
The company also acquired data governance platform Okera in May 2023, data replication company Arcion in October 2023, and natural language notebook developer Einblick in January 2024. And Ghodsi says we should expect more acquisitions to come as Databricks moves to build out its suite of AI tools.
The company, most recently valued at $43 billion, bills itself as the DIY alternative to OpenAI, a one-stop-shop for building your own LLMs. Why give your data over to Sam Altman when you can build your own models in-house?
“When it comes to Gen AI, our strategy is very simple,” said Ghodsi, “we are the best vendor out there if you want to train LLMs or AI on your private data.” Lilac AI, which helps users find new data to feed into their models as well as assess the quality of the data coming out, is part of that strategy.
