Databricks Acquires Two Startups to Power Its New AI-Driven Security Product

Databricks is putting its war chest to work. Fresh off a $5 billion funding round that closed last month — on top of billions in existing revenue — the cloud data analytics giant is making its move into enterprise security.

Introducing Lakewatch

The company announced on Tuesday the launch of Lakewatch, a new security product that combines Databricks’ existing strength in large-scale data storage with classic Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) capabilities, including threat detection and investigation. What sets it apart is the integration of AI agents powered by Anthropic’s Claude, positioning Lakewatch as a next-generation security operations platform built for the age of AI.

Two Quiet Acquisitions Behind the Product

Underpinning Lakewatch are two startup acquisitions that have only now come to light.

The first is Antimatter, a deal that closed last year but was not previously disclosed. Founded by security researcher Andrew Krioukov, Antimatter raised $12 million in a round led by New Enterprise Associates in 2022. The startup had been developing a “data control plane” tool designed to help enterprises deploy AI agents securely while protecting sensitive data — a capability Krioukov famously demonstrated at RSA’s Innovation Sandbox Contest in 2024. Krioukov has since been at Databricks for several months and is now leading the Lakewatch team.

The second acquisition is SiftD.ai, a deal that came together rapidly over just the past few weeks and closed on Monday. The startup was remarkably young at the time of acquisition — having only launched its product in November. SiftD offered an interactive notebook environment, similar in concept to a Jupyter notebook, designed as a collaborative workspace for both humans and AI agents.

Databricks’ familiarity with SiftD’s co-founder and CEO Steve Zhang likely accelerated the deal. Zhang spent years as chief scientist at Splunk, where he created the Search Processing Language, before co-founding SiftD.

Scale and Strategy

Both acquisitions involved small teams. SiftD counted only a handful of employees, while Antimatter had fewer than 50. SiftD in particular appears to function primarily as an acqui-hire. Databricks confirmed that employees from both companies have joined the organization, though it declined to specify exact headcount. Financial terms for both deals were not disclosed.

As for what comes next, Databricks made clear it has no intention of stopping. When asked whether it would continue pursuing acquisitions, a company spokesperson signaled an ongoing appetite: “We’re always looking to what’s next — our goal is to stay ahead of the market and close gaps in what our customers need.”