IBM today announced that it has acquired it Database, a startup that is developing a monitoring platform for data and machine learning pipelines. Details of the deal were not disclosed, but Tel Aviv-based Databand raised $14.5 million prior to the acquisition.
Databand employees will join IBM’s data and artificial intelligence division, and the purchase is expected to close on June 27.
In a statement, IBM’s General Manager for Data and AI Daniel Hernandez said integrating Databand into IBM’s broader portfolio will help the latter’s customers better identify and fix data issues including errors, pipeline failures and poor quality. The plan is to expand Databand’s monitoring capabilities for integration across commercial and open source tools, while allowing customers “total flexibility” to run Databand either as a service or a self-hosted subscription.
“Our customers are data-driven organizations that rely on high-quality, trustworthy data to run their mission-critical operations. When they can’t access the data they need at any moment, their business can come to a halt,” Hernandez said.
Hernandez sees the Databand as complementing IBM’s existing monitoring tools, namely IBM Observability by Instana APM and IBM Watson Studio. For example, he suggests, Databand could alert engineers when the data they’re using to run an analytics system is incomplete, triggering Instana to explain where the missing data came from and why the system failed.
“With the addition of the Databand, IBM … continues to provide our customers and partners with the technology they need to deliver reliable data and artificial intelligence at scale,” Hernandez added.
Databand was founded in 2018 by Josh Benamram, Victor Shafran and Evgeny Shulman. As my colleague Ingrid Lunden wrote in her company profile two years ago, Databand handles various pipeline metadata including logs, runtime information and data profiles, and presents it in one platform along with data from other sources such as Airflow, Spark and Snowflake. The aim is to give engineers an insight into where bottlenecks or anomalies may appear and what might be causing them.
Databand has been able to attract notable clients including FanDuel, Agoda and Trax Retail. Early investors were Accel, Blumberg Capital, Lerer Hippeau, Ubiquity Ventures, Differential Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners.
“You cannot protect what you cannot see, and when the data platform is ineffective, everyone – including customers,” Ben Amram said in a statement. “This is why global brands… are already relying on Databand to remove bad data surprises by discovering and resolving them before they create costly business impacts. Joining IBM will help us expand our software and significantly accelerate our ability to meet the evolving needs of enterprise customers” .
Data monitoring potential is a booming – and perhaps even recession-resistant – market. As the volume of data continues to rise, organizations are struggling to manage the health and quality of their datasets (say the vendor narrative). statista Estimates The sector will rise from $12.98 billion in value in 2020 to $19.38 billion in 2024, fueled by the growth of startups such as Manta, Monte Carlo, Edge Delta and Kripple. Investors poured more than half a billion dollars into start-ups that can be seen in the month of May alone.
In a press release, IBM noted Databand as its fifth acquisition in 2022. It continues the buying spree that Arvind Krishna started when he became CEO two years ago, focusing on companies in artificial intelligence, automation, cloud, and information technology.
