Databricks has acquired Tecton, a move aimed at enhancing real-time data capabilities for AI agents. The acquisition is intended to integrate Tecton's capabilities into Databricks' workflows, thereby improving the deployment and scaling of AI agents.

Tecton is recognised for its real-time feature store, which supports AI applications in areas such as fraud detection, risk scoring, and personalisation. Databricks sees the acquisition as a solution to transforming data from data warehouses and lakes into rich context available for AI agents in real-time.

The company was founded by the creators of Uber's AI platform and is designed to streamline the preparation, curation, and serving of AI data. The acquisition is further expected to allow Databricks customers to have automated online data serving within their data and AI platform.

Tecton's platform is known for offering sub-10 ms latency, sub-100ms freshness, and 99.99% uptime for data services. The integration with Databricks is anticipated to "unite the best in online data serving with Databricks’ Agent Bricks," Databricks suggests. This is expected to empower customers to "build, deploy and scale AI agents faster and more confidently than ever before" according to the vendor.

The acquisition is also seen as a strategic alignment, given that Databricks has previously invested in Tecton and shares many joint customers with them. Financial terms were not disclosed. However the deal comes a week after Databricks confirmed it had raised a new round of Series K funding, bringing it total market valuation to over US$100bn. The funding is earmarked for expanding its Agent Bricks product.

A spokesperson stated, "Tecton makes it seamless to launch decision-making AI agents in production by preparing, curating and serving critical AI context needed to build customised and personalised agent systems."