By Shubhangi Chowdhury
American cloud data management company Rubrik announced that it is going to acquire Predibase, a startup that specializes in deploying artificial intelligence models. Though the terms of the deal are yet to be disclosed, people familiar with the matter stated that Rubrik intends to pay between $100 million and $500 million.
Rubrik, which went public last year, has built a solid business making over $1 billion a year by backing up customer data and helping them recover quickly after cyberattacks. Now, with Predibase, it’s aiming to go a step further by helping companies run affordable AI models using their own internal data.
“We are an ambitious company, and we want to be a multiproduct, multigenerational company,” Rubrik CEO Bipul Sinha said in an interview.
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“Together, we can equip AI teams with the tools and building blocks needed to quickly bring enterprise-grade AI applications to production,” Sinha wrote in a blog post.
Founded in 2021, Predibase is built on top of two powerful open-source tools—Horovod and Ludwig which were originally developed at Uber. Co-founder Piero Molino helped create Ludwig back in 2019 after Uber bought his previous startup, and Travis Addair led development on Horovod as a senior engineer there. They teamed up with Devvret Rishi, who used to lead AI products at Google Cloud, and Stanford professor Chris Ré, whose past startup was acquired by Apple.
Predibase is an AI startup that helps companies build, fine-tune, and serve open-source machine learning models without needing deep ML expertise. In terms of funding, Predibase has raised approximately $28 million in a single Series A round—starting with $16 million in May 2022 and expanding with an additional $12.2 million announced in July 2023, led by investors like Felicis and Greylock.
“Many organizations still face challenges moving beyond the proof-of-concept stage,” said Devvret Rishi, Predibase chief executive, in a news release. “Predibase removes the hardest part of that journey and accelerates production-ready AI by giving teams an easy-to-use platform to tune models to their own data and run on an optimized inference stack. This unlocks more accurate results and faster models, all at lower cost.”
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Once the deal is done, Predibase will keep running as its own unit. It’ll still let customers plug in data from platforms like Amazon, Databricks, Google, and Snowflake to customize their AI models. On top of that, it’ll now also be able to tap into data stored in Rubrik’s Annapurna system, which pulls in info from outside sources too.
Rubrik’s data management platform is used by over 6,100 organizations to protect and manage their data. A big part of what it offers is helping IT teams prevent data loss. It backs up files from the cloud, on-prem systems, and other sources—and can quickly restore them if something goes wrong. There’s even a simulation tool so teams can test if their recovery plans actually work.
Rubrik also helps with data security. Its software can automatically spot sensitive info like credit card data, and gives admins the tools to set clear rules about who can access what, and how.
In May, Rubrik reported a loss that what was expected. They are looking forward with this acquisition.