Databricks acquires two startups to power new AI security products

With a war chest full of $5 billion in funding that closed last month (not to mention billions in revenue), Databricks is making acquisitions.

The company, best known for its cloud data analytics platform, announced Tuesday that it is launching a new security product called Lakewatch. Lakewatch leverages Databricks’ ability to store large amounts of data and perform traditional security information and event management (SIEM) tasks such as threat detection and investigation. It’s only with the help of an AI agent assisted by Claude from Anthropic.

Databricks has acquired two startups to support this new product. One is Antimatter, which is in a until-now undisclosed transaction that was completed last year, and the other is SiftD.ai, which was closed on Monday after a hasty transaction over the past few weeks, the company told TechCrunch.

Terms of either deal were not disclosed. Antimatter, founded by security researcher Andrew Kriokoff, raised $12 million in 2022 led by New Enterprise Associates, according to PitchBook estimates. Even if tiny SiftD.ai was raising money, PitchBook didn’t know.

SiftD.ai is very young, having only announced its product in November. It was an interactive notebook (like a Jupyter notebook) intended to be a tool for people and agents to work together. The Databricks team knew Steve Zhang, the startup’s co-founder and CEO, from his years as chief scientist at Splunk (until 2021). While there he created a search processing language. (His LinkedIn also says he was CTO of Astronomer during the Coldplay CEO scandal, but left there in 2023 before founding SiftD.)

All of these acquisitions were of small startups, with just a few people in the case of SiftD and fewer than 50 people in the case of Antimatter, according to LinkedIn. SiftD appears to be an acquisition. With Antimatter, Databricks probably acquired some IP as well. Krikov was demonstrating Antimatter’s technology on stage at RSA’s Innovation Sandbox competition in 2024. Antimatter was working on a “data control plane” tool that would allow enterprises to securely deploy agents while protecting sensitive data.

Databricks declined to say how many employees it has acquired, but confirmed that employees from the startup have indeed joined the company. Kriokoff has been with Databricks for the past few months, leading the Lakewatch team.

We asked Databricks if it plans to continue shopping startups, and a spokesperson basically said, “Yes, we’re continuing to keep you informed.” “We’re always looking at what’s next. Our goal is to stay ahead of the market and close the gap with what our customers need,” the spokesperson said.