Data Analytics Platform Databricks said Wednesday it has agreed to acquire Neon, an open source alternative to AWS Aurora Postgres, for about $1 billion.

Databricks said the technology to acquire NEON will allow the company to combine the serverless relational database management system it launches with its own data intelligence services to enable its customers to deploy AI agents more efficiently.

Founded in 2021 by CEO Nikita Shamgunov, along with software engineers Heikki Linnakangas and Stas Kelvich, Neon offers a cloud-based managed database platform with free and used paid usage plans that enable developers to clone databases and preview changes before they can do production. The platform automatically scales processors, memory, and storage based on usage, and supports branching (isolated database instances for testing and development) as well as time recovery.

Databricks says these features are great for workloads run by AI agents, which run faster than human developers, but often require supervision to control errors. The company cites recent telemetry, which the company says 80% of the databases “provisions provided on neon lights are automatically created by AI agents rather than humans.”

“The era of AI-native, proxy-driven applications is reshaping what databases have to do,” Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and CEO of Databricks, said in a statement. “Neon proves this: Four of every five databases on the platform are spinning by code rather than humans. By bringing Neon into databricks, we provide developers with a serverless post office that can keep up with proxy speed, paid, paid economics, and the openness of the Postgres community.”

According to Crunchbase, NEON raised $129.5 million, with investors including Microsoft's Venture Arm M12, General Catalyst, Menlo Ventures and well-known capital. Databricks has accumulated more than $19 billion in financing so far and made $15.3 billion in financing at a valuation of $62 billion in January.

Databricks has not yet retreated to Warchest as it tries to leverage the AI ​​boom and position it as the best service for building, testing, and deploying AI models and agents. The company reportedly acquired data management company Tabular in June last year for nearly $2 billion, and in 2023 it purchased Mosaicml, an open source platform for training large language models and deploying AI tools, deploying AI tools for $1.3 billion.