Investing in TickSmith: Enabling an E-Commerce Data Experience With Open Data Exchange

We are excited to announce Databricks Ventures’ investment in TickSmith, a leading SaaS platform that simplifies the online data shopping experience. The investment through the Lakehouse Fund, created to support early and growth-stage companies extending the lakehouse ecosystem, aligns with Databricks’ vision of supporting an open data economy. Together, this investment and partnership enable customers with the capabilities to package, commercialize, and share data products seamlessly.

TickSmith’s platform gives data buyers an easy, consumer-like experience while purchasing data, and enables data providers with the necessary tools to create a web store, package and commercialize their data. To augment their core capabilities, TickSmith was one of the first partners to implement Delta Sharing, an open and secure sharing protocol to enhance their distribution and solve some of the biggest challenges their customers were facing around data sharing.

The challenges that TickSmith heard from customers with existing data sharing solutions echoes what our own customers say. Traditional data sharing solutions limit data access to users on proprietary platforms, while homegrown solutions (SFTP and API) are difficult to manage, maintain and scale. This reduced the reach and full monetization potential for their customers. These core challenges come at a time when data sharing is critical as enterprises look to securely exchange data with their customers, suppliers and partners. This ultimately has led us, at Databricks, to rethink the future of data sharing and enable companies with better and more open solutions.

Now with Delta Sharing powering the TickSmith platform, data providers can easily create shares, manage recipients and distribute their offerings in an integrated environment. Data providers can send data across platforms in an open, secure and scalable way without the challenges mentioned before. Coupled with TickSmith’s native functionality for web store and data package creation, this helps organizations both big and small to monetize, exchange, and realize the full value of their data without the need for costly resources, large infrastructure, and data replication. Together, TickSmith and Delta Sharing are helping move execution of sharing data from IT to the end business users.

From a data consumer perspective, in addition to easy discovery and add-to-cart purchase provided by TickSmith, they have seamless access to the most up-to-date data they are provisioned for. Data consumers will receive credentials that will immediately grant them access to the data for them to analyze. As the data is updated the consumer will access live, ready-to-query data reducing delays and increasing efficiency.

We have already seen strong interest and traction with our joint offering, and the strategic investment deepens our relationship. TickSmith and Databricks plan to continue improving our joint solution for both data providers and consumers. Data providers will be able to set up a Databricks environment for the consumer to try out a sample dataset and provide quick-start solutions to accelerate the consumer journey. On the data consumer side, we plan to tighten integrations with the Databricks platform for consumers to be able to quickly view updated datasets in their own Databricks environment.

Learn more about Ticksmith with Delta Sharing and see a demo of the capabilities below.

Data Provider Demo

Data Consumer Demo