Mooncake acquisition boosts Databricks database capabilities

BREAKING -- Flush with cash from a spate of massive funding rounds, Databricks on Wednesday continued its acquisition spree with the purchase of database startup Mooncake Labs.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The acquisition of Mooncake closely follows Databricks' May purchase of Neon, a cloud-based database platform built on PostgreSQL. Buying Neon marked expansion for Databricks by adding open source database capabilities that can serve as a foundation for agentic AI development. Now, Neon's technology forms the infrastructure of Lakebase, a fully managed PostgreSQL database that combines operational database capabilities with lakehouse architecture.

Acquiring Mooncake adds new capabilities to Lakebase aimed at further enabling Databricks customers to easily develop agents and other AI applications trained on the proprietary data they store in the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform.

Traditionally, online transaction processing (OLTP) databases sit outside data platforms, requiring developers, engineers, autonomous agents and other users to extract, transform and load (ETL) from their data platforms into their OLTP databases to build and deploy AI tools and analytics applications. Each new workload, meanwhile, adds more data that needs to be moved, integrated and governed.

Mooncake's technology eliminates the expensive, time-consuming need to build and maintain ETL pipelines. Instead, it enables users to run AI, analytics and transactional workloads by mirroring changes -- providing an exact replica in real time -- from the PostgreSQL database to the lakehouse.

The acquisition of Mooncake, though valuable, is just the latest purchase for Databricks.

Based in San Francisco, the data platform vendor has raised nearly $22 billion in funding, including $10 billion in a single round in December 2024. Using that capital, Databricks has expanded beyond its roots as one of the founders of the data lakehouse architecture into AI development, where it now provides a comprehensive environment for building and deploying AI, including agents.

Databricks' acquisition spree started in earnest with its June 2023 acquisition of MosaicML, which now provides the foundation for the Mosaic AI platform for AI development. Other acquisitions include Arcion, Einblick and Lilac AI to add complementary AI development capabilities, BladeBridge to add data migration capabilities that aid AI development, and Tabular to provide support for open source Apache Iceberg tables that can be used when building AI tools.

Beyond improving Databricks' Postgres database capabilities, the acquisition of Mooncake adds expertise with Mooncake founders Zhou Sun, Cheng Chen and Pranav Aurora joining Databricks.

This story will be updated.

Eric Avidon is a senior news writer for Informa TechTarget and a journalist with more than 25 years of experience. He covers analytics and data management.