Databricks has bought two startups to support its new AI security product

With a surplus war chest from its $5 billion raise that closed last month (not to mention billions in revenue), Databricks is gaining ground.

The company, best known for its cloud data analytics platform, announced Tuesday that it will launch a new security product called Lakewatch. Lakewatch leverages Databricks’ ability to store massive amounts of data and perform classic security information and event management (SIEM) tasks, such as threat detection and investigation. She does this only with the help of AI agents powered by Anthropic’s Claude.

Databricks bought two startups to support this new product: Antimatter, in an as-yet-undisclosed deal that closed last year, and SiftD.ai, in a deal that flew together over the past two weeks and closed on Monday, the company told TechCrunch.

Terms were not disclosed for either deal. Antimatter, founded by security researcher Andrew Kryukov, raised $12 million led by New Enterprise Associates in 2022, according to PitchBook estimates. If little SiftD.ai had raised money, PitchBook wasn’t aware of it.

SiftD.ai was very new, only launching its product in November: an interactive notebook (like a Jupyter notebook) intended to be a tool where people and agents work together. The Databricks team knows the startup’s co-founder CEO Steve Chang from his many years as chief scientist at Splunk (until 2021). He created the search processing language while there. (His LinkedIn also says he was CTO at Astronomer, in the Coldplay CEO scandal, but left there in 2023 before founding SiftD.)

Both acquisitions were from small startups — just a few people in the case of SiftD and less than 50 people in the case of Antimatter, according to LinkedIn. SiftD appears to be an acquired company. With antimatter, Databricks may have gained some intellectual property rights as well. Kryukov had demonstrated the antimatter technology on stage in 2024 at the RSA’s Innovation Sandbox Contest. Antimatter was working on a “data control plane” tool that allowed organizations to deploy agents securely, while protecting sensitive data.

While Databricks refused to disclose the number of employees it had acquired, it confirmed that the startup’s employees had already joined the company. Kryukov, who has been working at Databricks for months, leads the Lakewatch team.

We asked Databricks if it will continue to shop for startups, and the spokesperson said, yes, it is constantly feeling its feelings. “We’re always looking to what’s next – our goal is to stay ahead of the market and fill the gaps in what our customers need,” the spokesperson said.