Enterprise data company Databricks Inc. announced today that it has agreed to acquire Arcion Labs Inc., a provider of enterprise data replication and ingestion technology, in a transaction valued at more than $100 million.

Databricks provides a big-data engineering platform that allows enterprise customers to process and transform large volumes of information, which has become a mainstay of artificial intelligence applications. Arcion’s technology operates by providing a way for companies to move large amounts of data from one platform to another with low latency and consistency.

Through the acquisition, Databricks will gain the technology to allow customers to rapidly replicate their cloud-based data information sources across large scales in an easy-to-use, real-time, high-performance platform that requires no-code. Using Arcion, engineers can quickly move data between clouds, databases and applications without the need for complex coding or configurations.

Arcion was founded in 2016 and since then the company has raised more than $18 million, including investments from Databricks during the company’s $13 million Series A funding round in February 2022.

“To build analytical dashboards, data applications and AI models, data needs to be replicated from the systems of record like CMS, ERP and enterprise apps to the Lakehouse,” said Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and chief executive of Databricks. “Arcion’s highly reliable and easy-to-use solution will enable our customers to make that data available almost instantly for faster and more informed decision-making.”

Arcion’s data “connector” technology will bring the ability to ingest data from a large number of enterprise data sources to Databricks, including widely used databases such as Oracle, MySQL and Postgres. The company also provides a reliable, scalable “change data capture” engine capable of ingesting information from data warehouses from software-as-a-service platforms from enterprise offerings from Salesforce Inc., SAP SE and Workday Inc.

The acquisition news comes shortly after Databricks announced a large late-stage funding round for $500 million at a colossal $43 billion valuation in September. It also follows the company’s acquisition of generative artificial intelligence startup MosaicML Inc. in a deal worth $1.3 billion in June. The company has been working to enable the ever-growing interest and needs for data ingestion and management for generative AI, which requires tremendous amounts of information to be gathered for training and fine-tuning of large language models and image-generating models.

Arcion Chief Executive Gary Hagmueller said one of the issues dealing with the data needs of AI is that data pipelines are often the most fragile and difficult part of the process. “As the demand for AI technology grew, it became increasingly obvious that the hardest part of delivering performant apps was not the AI itself, it was the prosaic task of getting access to source data,” he said. “Every implementation featured a difficult, iterative and lengthy data pipe building project.”

By simplifying the capability of ingesting data from numerous sources and making it easier to get information, especially from multiple siloed systems, enterprise customers can make the most out of their data. When it comes to AI, data represents the most valuable commodity, but if it’s unavailable and difficult to access, it’s not useful to AI models.

Image: Production Perig