Databricks, a $38 billion company, announced on Monday it had agreed to acquire a 2-years old generative artificial intelligence (AI) startup MosaicML in a mostly stock deal valued at whopping $1.3 billion, which include retention packages of MosaicML team.
Last month, MosaicML released two AI products aimed at beating industry giants such as OpenAI on the cost. MosaicML has several generative AI services that compete more directly with companies like OpenAI or Anthropic
MosaicML is known for its state-of-the-art MPT large language models (LLMs). With over 3.3 million downloads of MPT-7B and the recent release of MPT-30B, MosaicML has showcased how organizations can quickly build and train their own state-of-the-art models using their data in a cost-effective way. MosaicML claims to offer these AI services at a cost as much as 15 times lower than its competitors.
Two of the unique features of MosaicML are — firstly, it's open-source. And secondly, it allows developers to maintain full control over the AI models they build with model ownership and data privacy built into the platform’s design.
Post acquisition, the entire MosaicML team, including MosaicML’s industry-leading research team, is expected to join Databricks.
Databricks and MosaicML will together make generative AI accessible for every organization, enabling them to build, own and secure generative AI models with their own data, said the announcement by Databricks.
MosaicML was founded in 2021, by former Intel executive and Nervana Founder — Naveen Rao, and Hanlin Tang. Naveen founded Nervana in 2014 and after two years, in 2016, sold it to Intel for about $408 million. Similarly, MosaicML too has been sold within two years of its launch though the later was on stealth mode for considerable time before being launched out in public. MosaicML had raised $64 million from investors including Lux Capital, DCVC, AME Cloud Ventures, Lux, Frontline, Atlas, Playground Global and Samsung Next.
About Databricks, the San Francisco based company was founded in 2013 and is a spin-off from the AMPLab project at University of California, Berkeley that was involved in making Apache Spark, an open-source distributed computing framework built atop Scala.
In March this year, Databricks released open-source language model named Dolly, that it said companies could use to create their own chatbots along the lines of OpenAI's ChatGPT.
Just in last month, Databricks acquired data security startup Okera to extend its data governance capabilities. In June 2020, Databricks acquired Redash, an open-source tool for data scientists. Later in October 2021, it acquired German no-code company 8080 Labs.
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