San Francisco-based Databricks announced on Wednesday that it will acquire another startup in the city that makes AI-powered data governance tools.
Okera develops no-code tools for enterprise customers to manage sensitive and personally identifiable data while maintaining security and performance at scale. The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the acquisition is expected to close later this month. Okera was last valued at $100 million in 2021 and had raised nearly $40 million, the company confirmed to Bay Area Inno.
Okera's team will join Databricks, the companies said in a blog post announcing the deal, including Okera CEO Nong Li. Li co-founded the company in 2016 with Amandeep Khurana, who left Okera after four years and currently works at Amazon Web Services, according to his LinkedIn.
“We founded Okera to help modern, data-driven enterprises accelerate legitimate data access while minimizing data security risks and delivering regulatory compliance," Li said in a statement. "Many organizations don’t have enough technical talent to manage access policies at scale, especially with the explosion of LLMs. What they need is a modern, AI-centric governance solution. We could not be more excited to join the Databricks team and to bring our expertise in building secure, scalable and simple governance solutions for some of the world’s most forward-thinking enterprises.”
Databricks was co-founded in 2013 by CEO Ali Ghodsi and provides cloud-based data management and analytics software to other businesses. Databricks will integrate Okera's technology into its data governance platform, which it calls the Unity Catalogue, the announcement said.
"Our customers will benefit from being able to use AI to discover, classify and govern all their data, analytics, and AI assets (including ML models and model features) with attribute-based and intent-based access policies," Databricks said in the announcement. "This forthcoming acquisition will also enable us to expose APIs for richer policies that other data governance partners can use, providing seamless solutions for our customers."
In March, Databricks released its own AI-powered chatbot called Dolly to compete with OpenAI's ChatGPT. Unlike ChatGPT, Dolly is an open-source tool that was developed using large language models from projects at Stanford and Meta.
Databricks has raised $3.5 billion and was valued at $38 billion in 2021 after closing a $1.6 billion Series H round. Its investors include Morgan Stanley, AWS, Salesforce Ventures, Tiger Global Management, T. Rowe Price, Coatue Management, Microsoft, Battery Ventures and DCVC.
