Today, we’re thrilled to announce that Neon will be joining forces with Databricks after the transaction closes. This is a proud moment and will be the beginning of an even more ambitious chapter. This acquisition will give us the scale and backing to accelerate our mission.

Databricks is a company we’ve long admired. They’ve built an incredible business on top of open source software and a relentless focus on data and AI. What Spark did for big data, they are now doing for the AI stack.

From early on, our teams have been aligned, culturally and technically. We have had regular coffee chats, traded notes on architecture, and shared a belief that the future of data is unified: analytics, ML, and now OLTP all belong in the same ecosystem. Personally, I helped kickstart their Belgrade office, and Stas was at the ribbon-cutting. We’ve had shared DNA from day one.

With this acquisition, we will be building together.

TL;DR: Data analytics startup Databricks said Wednesday that it is buying Neon, a cloud-based database software vendor, for about $1 billion.

Neon has more than 18,000 customers, Databricks said in a statement. Clients include OpenAI, Adobe, Boston Consulting Group, Replit and Vercel, according to Neon’s website.

Many developers (myself included) have flocked to Neon, which is open source and billed as an alternative to Amazon Web Services’ Aurora Postgres database service.