Cloudera Inc. today announced that it has acquired Verta Inc., a venture-backed developer of tools for building artificial intelligence applications.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed. The acquisition comes about three years after Cloudera, a major provider of data management and analysis software, was itself bought by two private equity firms for $5.3 billion.

“Cloudera is acquiring Verta’s AI Operational platform to strengthen our team and accelerate our operational AI capabilities,” said Cloudera Chief Executive Officer Charles Sansbury. “We are moving quickly to provide our customers with the technologies they need to drive their data and AI initiatives, and we have no plans to slow down.”

Verta raised more than $15 million in funding from Intel Capital and other investors prior to the acquisition. Its namesake software platform provides prepackaged AI models, datasets with which those models can be trained and sample prompts. These starter kits, as the company describes them, promise to speed up AI development projects by removing the need for software teams to build everything from scratch.

Adding RAG, or retrieval-augmented generation, features to neural networks is another task that Verta promises to ease. RAG is a machine learning technique that makes it possible to expand an AI model’s knowledge base without retraining it. That significantly reduces infrastructure requirements and thereby lowers costs.

Implementing RAG manually can involve a significant amount of effort. According to Verta, its platform compresses the workflow into as little as a few minutes. It also removes the need for developers to write custom code.

Providing a neural network with access to additional data using RAG is not the only way to improve the quality of its output. In some cases, making slight modifications to a prompt’s text can likewise enhance AI responses. But determining exactly which modifications lead to a quality improvement is often a time-consuming chore. 

Verta’s platform includes a tool called PromptBrew that automates the task. According to the company, developers can enter a prompt and have the tool create variations of the input text that will lead to higher-quality AI responses. Software teams can use PromptBrew to improve the output that their AI applications generate for end-users.

Verta’s technology will complement the existing machine learning features that Cloudera provides as part of its flagship data platform. Those features are designed to ease tasks such as training AI models and deploying them in production. Cloudera also offers so-called AMPs, software bundles similar to Verta’s AI starter kits that provide pre-packaged machine learning building blocks to save time for developers. 

Image: Cloudera