Databricks Inc., a closely held software company, agreed to acquire startup Tabular as part of an effort to broaden its capabilities and help customers take advantage of artificial intelligence.
Databricks, which competes with Snowflake Inc. (NYSE: SNOW) and the major cloud-computing providers, declined to say how much it paid for Tabular, which makes data management software. The Wall Street Journal, which reported the deal earlier, put the price at $1 billion to $2 billion.
San Francisco-based Databricks and Snowflake help customers organize, analyze and store information in ways designed to make it easier to use artificial intelligence tools.
Tabular was founded by the creators of Iceberg, a data storage method they developed at Netflix Inc. that has become more popular in recent years. The San Jose, Calif.-based startup helps clients use a variety of products including Iceberg. It had raised $37 million as of last September from investors including Andreessen Horowitz and Altimeter Capital.
“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,” Ryan Blue, Tabular’s chief executive officer and co-founder, said in a joint statement announcing the deal.
Separately, Snowflake said at its product conference that it was adding tools to help clients who use Iceberg.
