Databricks has agreed to acquire database startup Neon in a deal valued at about $1 billion, a move the company hopes will make it more attractive to businesses that want to create their own artificial intelligence bots. The data analytics company said the deal addresses a challenge that businesses face when deploying AI agents: how to quickly link up the data they need to make their services run. The problem gets harder as more AI agents are writing code and executing tasks, said Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and chief executive of Databricks. “Pretty much every customer we have is super excited and wants to leverage agents,” said Ghodsi, referring to the autonomous bots that can make decisions and perform tasks on behalf of humans. But the problem is, those bots need to be able to create new databases to support what they do. Enter Neon, a cloud-based database platform that developers—and AI bots—use when building apps and websites. The platform is based on the popular open-source database PostgreSQL, a relational database that dates back to the late 1980s. Neon would serve as the underlying database for customers that create AI agents with data they store in Databricks’ platform. Databricks makes money by renting out analytics capabilities, AI and other cloud-based software that taps AI-ready data for building enterprise tech systems.

Full story : Databricks agrees to acquire cloud database startup Neon for ~$1 billion, set to close in Databricks’ Q2 2025; Neon’s platform is based on the open-source PostgreSQL.