WHY DATABRICKS ACQUIRED TABULAR
How Databricks’ $2.2 billion Tabular deal helped Tim Chen’s Essence VC nearly return its entire fund
Tim Chen wasn’t planning to raise a new venture capital fund when investors began approaching him. His investment in Tabular, acquired by Databricks in 2024, helped put Essence VC on the map. The interest eventually helped Chen close a $41 million fourth fund, even before he had prepared a pitch deck.
Mastercard’s AI Garage is building products for the world in India: Nitendra Rajput
Mastercard's AI Garage in India builds global payment network products. It uses machine learning and data science to secure payment networks. The company develops large tabular models for transaction data analysis. Mastercard also explores agentic commerce and establishes AI governance frameworks.
Andreessen Horowitz makes a $3 billion bet against the AI bubble
The venture capital firm, which goes by the nickname a16z, set up a dedicated $1.25 billion war chest in 2024 for bets on AI infrastructure, a term that the fund defines more broadly than the costly chips and data centers that make AI run. This month, the firm said it would commit another $1.7 billion to the effort.
Databricks to buy Sequoia-backed Tecton in AI agent push
Tecton, backed by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins, provides software that helps companies analyze and deploy data at scale with low latency. Financial terms of the deal, which consists of Databricks' private shares, were not disclosed. Tecton was last valued at $900 million in a 2022 private funding round and has about 90 employees.
Databricks continues M&A spree, will buy Neon for $1 billion in AI-agent push
Demand for AI agents, programs that need little human intervention in executing routine tasks such as writing code or sending emails, has been growing as companies embrace the new technology to automate workflows and improve efficiency, creating demand for Neon's specific databases that are optimized for AI agents.
