Bipul Sinha, co-founder and CEO of Rubrik, a Microsoft-backed cybersecurity software company, rings the opening bell during his company’s IPO at the New York Stock Exchange in New York on April 25, 2024.
Brendan Mcdermid | Reuters
Data management software vendor Rubrik said Wednesday that it's buying Predibase, a startup that helps with the deployment of artificial intelligence models.
Terms of the deal weren't disclosed, but a person familiar with the transaction said Rubrik intends to pay between $100 million and $500 million. The person asked not to be named because the numbers are private.
Rubrik is acquiring its way into the red-hot AI market. Cloud infrastructure providers are generating billions of dollars from renting out Nvidia graphics processing units for training and running models, while model developers Anthropic and OpenAI are growing rapidly by selling subscriptions to their chatbot services. Other companies with specialized software are bringing out dedicated AI tools.
Rubrik, which went public last year, has built a business with over $1 billion in annualized revenue by backing up its customers' data so clients can quickly recover from cyberattacks. With Predibase, Rubrik can expand into helping companies operate cost-efficient models that draw on internal data.
"We are an ambitious company, and we want to be a multi-product, multi-generational company," Rubrik CEO Bipul Sinha said in an interview.
Predibase was launched in 2021 by a group of founders that included Travis Addair and Piero Molino, who both previously worked on AI tools at Uber that have since gained adoption outside the company.
The startup employs 25 people and is based in San Francisco. Venture firms Felicis and Greylock Partners invested over $28 million in the company, and clients include Checkr, Marsh McLennan and Qualcomm.
Predibase will operate as a separate unit after the deal closes, and will continue allowing customers to connect data stored in third-party systems from Amazon, Databricks, Google and Snowflake, in order to customize models. Predibase will also be able to consume data stored in Rubrik's Annapurna, which can incorporate data from external sources, Sinha said. From there, Predibase runs models on cloud infrastructure.
Rubrik has nearly tripled in value since its IPO last year, as revenue has consistently surpassed Wall Street's projections.
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