Databricks Ventures Invests in Tecton: An Enterprise Feature Platform for the Lakehouse

Operational machine learning, which involves applying machine learning to customer-facing applications or business operations, requires solving complex data problems. Data teams need to turn raw data into features (i.e, data used as inputs into a predictive model), and then serve and monitor these features in production. The challenge of deploying machine learning to production for operational purposes introduces new requirements for data tools and data infrastructure. At Databricks, we understand the tremendous value that solving these challenges could provide to customers and end users.

Today, we are pleased to announce Databricks Ventures’ investment in Tecton, the enterprise feature platform company. Tecton’s founders, Mike del Baso and Kevin Stumpf, met while working at Uber where they were part of the pioneering team building the Michelangelo Machine Learning Platform. There, they experienced firsthand the challenges of operationalizing machine learning, which ultimately led them to build Tecton so that companies can more easily operationalize ML in their applications. Tecton’s products are built to make AI and machine learning more accessible, which is strongly aligned with Databricks’ overarching mission to simplify and democratize data and AI.

The investment follows our recent announcement of a deeper partnership between Databricks and Tecton. Tecton has deeply integrated into Databricks to serve as a central interface between the Databricks Lakehouse Platform and customers’ ML models, and customers can use this integrated offering to build production-ready ML features on Databricks in minutes.

At Databricks, we believe in providing our customers with choices to complement their use of the Databricks Lakehouse Platform. While many of our customers are already leveraging Databricks’ Feature Store and other feature engineering capabilities to deliver cutting edge ML use cases, we believe our customers should be empowered to complement their ML use cases with other innovative tools such as Tecton.

We are excited to partner with Tecton to provide our customers with an unrivaled platform for all of their machine learning and AI needs, and we will continue to look for more ways to work even more closely with Tecton. In the future, our joint customers can expect to see an even more seamless integration via Tecton’s availability within Databricks Partner Connect. Keep an eye out for more announcements later this year!