Data bricks today Announced what’s wrong with it acquired Okera, an AI-focused data governance platform. The two companies did not disclose the purchase price. According to Crunchbase, Okera previously raised just under $30 million. Investors include Felicis, Bessemer Venture Partners, Cyber Mentor Fund, ClearSky, and Emergent Ventures.
Data governance was already a hot topic, but the recent focus on AI has highlighted some of the shortcomings of the previous approach, Databricks notes in today’s announcement. “Historically, data governance technologies, regardless of their sophistication, are based on enforcing control at a narrow waist layer and require workloads to fit into the ‘walled garden’ at this layer,” the company explains in a blog post. That approach no longer works in the era of extensive language models (LLMs) because the number of assets is growing too fast (in part because so much of it is machine-generated) and because the overall AI landscape is changing so much. quickly. standard access controls cannot capture these changes fast enough.
Okera then uses an AI-powered system that can automatically discover and classify personally identifiable information, label it, and apply rules to it (with a focus on metadata), using a no-code interface.
As the Databricks team highlighted, that’s one reason the company was interested in acquiring Okera, but the other is the service isolation technology, which can enforce governance control on arbitrary workloads without big general expenses. This technology is still in private preview, but it was probably one of the main reasons Databricks acquired the company.
Data bricks, which thrown out his own LLM a few weeks ago, he plans to integrate Okera’s technology into his unit catalog, your existing AI asset and data governance solution. The company also noted that the acquisition will allow Databricks to expose additional APIs that its own data governance partners will be able to use to provide solutions to their clients.
With this acquisition, Databricks also brings on the co-founder and CEO of Okera nong li on board. Li created the apache parquet data storage format and was actually an engineer briefly at Databricks between working at Cloudera and before starting Okera, where he was the founding CTO and became CEO in February 2022.
“As data continues to grow in volume, velocity, and variety across different applications, CIOs, CDOs, and CEOs across the board have to balance those two often-conflicting initiatives—not to mention, historically, managing access policies across multiple clouds has been painful. and it is time consuming,” Li writes in today’s announcement. “Many organizations do not have enough technical talent to manage access policies at scale, especially with the explosion of LLMs. What they need is a modern, AI-centric governance solution. We couldn’t be more excited to join the Databricks team and bring our experience building secure, scalable and simple government solutions to some of the world’s most innovative companies.”
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