Rubrik Acquires Predibase to Boost AI Agent Adoption in Enterprise Data Management

Rubrik acquires Predibase to accelerate adoption of AI agents | TechCrunch

Data cybersecurity company Rubrik announced Wednesday its intent to acquire Predibase. Predibase is a venture-backed startup that helps companies train and fine-tune open source AI models to customize them to their needs. Rubrik is the latest company to make an acquisition with the goal of boosting enterprise AI agent adoption. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, though CNBC reported that the deal was between $100 million and $500 million, a sizable range. Rubrik declined to comment on the deal size. Predibase was founded in 2021 by Devvret Rishi, current CEO, Piero Molino, current chief science officer, and Travis Addair, current CTO. The company has raised more than $28 million in VC money from investors including Felicis, Greylock and Sancus Ventures, among others. The integration of Predibase will allow Rubrik users to accelerate building AI agents through Amazon Bedrock, Azure OpenAI, and Google Agentspace, according to a press release. "When [Predibase's] capabilities are paired with secure data platforms like Rubrik's, they can be transformative, helping ensure trusted data powers responsible and impactful AI," Bipul Sinha, co-founder and CEO of Rubrik, wrote in a blog post about the deal. "Just as Rubrik has simplified access to secured, governed data for AI, Predibase is solving the performance and cost issues around deploying large language models for agentic and other AI applications." Rubrik is just one in a growing list of companies making acquisitions to bolster their technology stack for the creation of AI agents. Salesforce acquired data management firm Informatica for $8 billion in May. Snowflake acquired Crunchy Data to bolster its AI agent offerings in early June, and Collibra acquired Raito for similar reasons a few days later. Rubrik was founded in 2014 and raised more than $1.6 billion in venture capital, from firms including Khosla Ventures, IVP, and Lightspeed Venture Partners, among others, before going public in April 2024.

Rubrik agrees to buy AI startup Predibase for over $100 million

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. 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.

Rubrik acquires LLM tooling startup Predibase for reported $100M+ - SiliconANGLE

Rubrik acquires LLM tooling startup Predibase for reported $100M+ Rubrik Inc. today announced plans to acquire Predibase Inc., a startup that develops software for fine-tuning large language models. CNBC reported that the deal is worth $100 million to $500 million. That represents a major exit for Predibase's investors, who had provided the company with about $28 million in funding prior to the sale. NYSE-listed Rubrik provides a data management platform used by more than 6,100 organizations. Many on the platform's features focus on helping administrations avoid data loss. Rubrik can create backups of records stored in cloud environments, on-premises arrays and other sources, as well as restore them if an outage occurs. A recovery simulation tool allows administrators to test that their data protection workflows function as intended. Another set of features in Rubrik's platform promises to help companies secure their data. The software automatically detects files that contain sensitive records such as payment card details. It allows administrators to define policies that regulate which worker can access which record and how. According to Rubrik, the data that enterprises manage using its platform is useful for artificial intelligence projects. The technology that Predibase brings to the table will enable the company to simplify such AI projects for its customers. "Together, we can equip AI teams with the tools and building blocks needed to quickly bring enterprise-grade AI applications to production," Rubrik co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Bipul Sinha (pictured) wrote in a blog post today. Predibase's namesake platform enables developers to fine-tune open-source LLMs. Fine-tuning is a process that increases the quality of an LLM's output by putting it through additional training. This training is done with examples of tasks highly similar to the ones the model will perform in production. Predibase uses a technique called LoRA to streamline the fine-tuning process. It works by extending the LLM being customized with a small number of additional parameters, or configuration settings. This approach is considerably faster than the standard way of fine-tuning an LLM, which involves modifying all its existing parameters. Predibase's platform also supports a second fine-tuning approach dubbed Turbo LoRA. It combines LoRA with another machine learning method known as speculative decoding. The latter technology allows LLMs to generate multiple output tokens at once, which is faster than the usual approach of outputting tokens one at a time. Predibase says that Turbo LoRA triples LLMs' inference performance in some cases. After fine-tuning an AI model, the company's platform can deploy it to production using a technology called LoRAX. It's an open-source tool that speeds up LLM inference by applying various performance optimizations. According to the company, LoRAX allows developers to run up to thousands of AI models using a single graphics card. "Their tools allow customized models to run and scale -- economically and quickly," Sinha wrote today. Predibase will operate as a standalone business unit of Rubrik after the acquisition closes. Its platform will remain compatible with the third-party data management platforms that it currently supports.

Rubrik Eyes Predibase Acquisition To Speed Up Customer AI Projects

'What the Predibase team has achieved with model training and serving infrastructure in the last few years is nothing short of remarkable,' Rubrik CEO Bipul Sinha said in a statement. Rubrik plans to buy open source artificial intelligence model fine-tuning upstart Predibase for, reportedly, more than $100 million to help customers move agentic AI projects from pilot to production at scale faster. Palo Alto, Calif.-based Rubrik, a data security vendor, has entered an agreement to buy San Francisco-based Predibase and leverage its proprietary post-training stack toward AI results with better accuracy, lower costs, better performance and automated data governance, according to a statement Wednesday. The companies didn't disclose a purchase price, but CNBC reported that Rubrik will pay between $100 million and $500 million. "What the Predibase team has achieved with model training and serving infrastructure in the last few years is nothing short of remarkable," Bipul Sinha-Rubrik's CEO, chairman and co-founder-said in a statement. "AI engineers and developers across the industry trust their expertise. ... Rubrik and Predibase will drive agentic AI adoption around the world and unlock immediate value for our customers." Part of Rubrik's top 2025 channel goals is increasing the overall percentage of company revenue that comes through the channel, according to CRN's Channel Chiefs list. Sinha said that acquiring Predibase should help Rubrik move beyond a reputation as a data security vendor to one as "a key enabler for building AI." The two companies hope to tackle the more than half of AI projects that never make it to production on average and bring down an estimated eight months it can take to move AI projects from prototype to production. "With Predibase, we will make strides to accelerate our customers' journey and to bring secure data to power AI," he said. Devvret Rishi, Predibase's CEO who co-founded the company in 2021, said that complementary technologies with Rubrik took the two vendors' partnership beyond Predibase just building a governed model layer on top of Rubrik's secure data lake. "Together, we'll be building towards a shared vision at the intersection of AI, security, and data-what we believe to be the most important frontier in enterprise software," Rishi said in a statement Wednesday. Rishi took over the CEO role in 2023, previously serving as Predibase's chief product officer, according to his LinkedIn account. Rubrik last reported quarterly earnings on June 5. Subscription revenue surged 54 percent, from the same period a year earlier, to reach $265.7 million, while subscription annual recurring revenue climbed 38 percent to $1.18 billion. Rubrik previously bought developer operations (DevOps) backups security vendor Backrightup earlier this year. Other recent major acquisitions in the security space include Snyk buying AI security research firm Invariant Labs and Zscaler's plan to buy managed detection and response (MDR) vendor Red Canary.