Highlights: 

  • Employees at Databand will join IBM’s data and AI business, and the acquisition will likely finalize on July 27
  • The sector expects to increase from $12.98 billion in value in 2020 to $19.38 billion in 2024

IBM announced the acquisition of Databand, a start-up building an observability platform for data and machine learning pipelines today. Although the deal’s specifics were kept under wraps, Tel Aviv-based Databand had previously raised USD 14.5 million.

Employees at Databand will join IBM’s data and AI division, and the acquisition will likely finalize on July 27.

According to IBM General Manager for Data and AI, Daniel Hernandez, Databand’s integration into IBM’s more extensive portfolio will enable IBM clients to more effectively identify and address data problems such as errors, pipeline failures, and poor quality. While giving customers “complete flexibility” to deploy Databand as a service or a self-hosted subscription, the goal is to increase Databand’s observability capabilities for integrations across open source and for-profit solutions.

Hernandez sees IBM’s current observability solutions like IBM Observability by Instana APM and IBM Watson Studio, enhanced by Databand. He suggests that Databand could alert engineers if the power and analytics system is using incomplete data, triggering Instana to identify and explain the origin of missing data and the reasons for the system failure.

“With the addition of Databand, IBM … is continuing to provide our clients and partners with the technology they need to deliver trustworthy data and AI at scale,” Hernandez added.

Victor Shafran, Evgeny Shulman, and Josh Benamram collaborated to co-found Databand in 2018. Databand crunches diverse pipeline metadata, including logs, runtime information, and data profiles in a single platform with data from other sources like Airflow, Spark, and Snowflake. The objective is to give engineers a perspective of the locations and likely causes of bottlenecks and abnormalities.

FanDuel, Agoda, and Trax Retail are just a few of the major clients that Databand was able to attract. Early investors included Accel, Blumberg Capital, Lerer Hippeau, Ubiquity Ventures, Differential Ventures, and Bessemer Venture Partners.

The market for data observability is expanding and may perhaps be even recession-proof. Organizations struggle to maintain the quality and health of their datasets as data volume rises. According to Statista, the sector might increase from USD 12.98 billion in 2020 to USD 19.38 billion in value in 2024. It will benefit from expanding start-ups like Manta, Monte Carlo, Edge Delta, and Cribl. Over USD 500 million worth of investment poured into observability businesses in May.

In a news statement, IBM mentions that Databand is its fifth purchase in 2022. It continues the acquisition drive Arvind Krishna began when he became CEO two years ago, concentrating on IT, automation, AI, and cloud businesses.

Experts’ Take

Josh Benamram, a co-founder of Databand, said, “You can’t protect what you can’t see, and when the data platform is ineffective, everyone is impacted – including customers. That’s why global brands … already rely on Databand to remove bad data surprises by detecting and resolving them before they create costly business impacts. Joining IBM will help us scale our software and significantly accelerate our ability to meet the evolving needs of enterprise clients.”

“Our clients are data-driven enterprises who rely on high-quality, trustworthy data to power their mission-critical processes. When they don’t have access to the data they need in any given moment, their business can grind to a halt,” Hernandez said.