Databricks acquires machine learning operations tech startup Cortex Labs
Daniel Levi
Posted On April 25, 2022
Databricks has acquired San Francisco-based machine learning operations (MLOps) tech startup Cortex Labs. The total amount of the deal was not disclosed. Headquartered in San Francisco, Cortex helps data scientists and engineering teams deploy native machine learning models in the cloud.
As part of the acquisition agreement, the entire Cortext team including co-founders Omer Spillinger and David Eliahu will join the Databricks team.
Databricks already provides advanced capabilities for developing models. The acquisition will further enable Databricks will augment its platform with capabilities to scale, monitor ML workloads in production, and accelerate its model serving and MLOps on its platform.
Cortex will also enable Databricks customers to scale production ML workloads reliably, securely, and cost-effectively by helping their data engineers deploy ML models in production without worrying about DevOps or cloud infrastructure.
The announcement comes just about six months after Databricks raised $1.6 billion in a Series H funding round, pushing the company’s valuation from $28 billion to $38 billion. This Series H round was led by Morgan Stanley’s Counterpoint Global fund, alongside new investors Baillie Gifford and New York City-based ClearBridge Investments.
In a blog post, Databricks said:
“We’re thrilled to welcome Co-founders Omer Spillinger and David Eliahu to the Databricks team. Together, we’ll be working to realize our shared vision of an end-to-end, multi-cloud platform that empowers enterprises to deliver machine learning applications to their customers.”
CEO Omer Spillinger and David Eliahu founded Cortex Labs when they were both students at Berkeley. It all started when they observed that one of the problems around creating machine learning models was finding a way to deploy them. The duo eventually was able to create a mousetrap to address some of the problems plaguing data scientists who are not experts in infrastructure.
Silicon Valley-based Databricks was founded in 2013 by Ali Ghodsi (CEO), Andy Konwinski, Ion Stoica, Matei Zaharia, Patrick Wendell, Reynold Xin, and Scott Shenker. The startup provides an enterprise software platform that helps its customers unify their analytics across the business, data science, and data engineering. More than 5,000 organizations worldwide, including Comcast, Condé Nast, Nationwide, H&M, and over 40% of the Fortune 500, use Databricks’ unified data platform for data engineering, machine learning, and analytics.
Databricks rose to prominence after it helped companies implement a version of Apache Spark, an alternative to the Hadoop technology for storing lots of different kinds of data in massive quantities.
