Have You Ever Heard of Predibase?
Have you ever heard of Predibase? Some of you will raise your hands, but my guess is that most of you haven’t heard of the four year old, venture backed, accelerator of open source AI.
Founded by AI technologists from Google and Uber and funded by Greylock and Felicis, Predibase offers a fast way to fine-tune open source models into highly accurate, production-ready solutions. The Predibase platform combines a proprietary post-training stack for customizing models with a highly optimized inference engine. The platform includes a turbo serving engine for more than 2x performance gains, along with LoRA eXchange, an open source system for deploying personalized models at scale. With Predibase, teams can support different users, use cases, and departments without ballooning infrastructure costs.
On June 25, 2025, Rubrik announced their intention of acquiring Predibase for an undisclosed amount. Predibase is a prime example of just how fast things are moving in the AI space today. How could a 4 year old company with $28.5 million in venture capital funding move fast enough to create value for an acquisition? Five years ago, I would have said that is an amazing feat, and it still is an amazing feat; but this seems to be the norm with AI companies, most of which were founded in the wake of the October 22, 2022 introduction of Open AI and Chat GPT. For a proof point, go check out the Snowflake acquisition of Datavolo acquisition.
That brings us to the next question, why would a cyber security company like Rubrik acquire an agentic AI acceleration engine like Predibase? Since its founding in 2014 and IPO in 2024, Rubrik has focused almost exclusively on cyber security, especially with a focus on data protection as a foundation for threat analysis and cyber security. Since their IPO their stock has continued to rise on the back of strong execution and on the hope of AI enablement as core to their solution.
So, at some point, investors will ask, “How are you going to keep up with the current innovation rate of AI?” Question answered. It seems that they are using the success of their growth engine to acquire AI technology that will become core to the platform; and perhaps more importantly, they are acquiring a team of people with deep roots in AI technology and a proven track record in success with customer implementations.
What remains unanswered? Predibase was already seeing success across a broad spectrum of industries, and certainly not limited to cybersecurity. So, then, what happens to Predibase customers who are not related to cybersecurity? And what happens to the broadbase go-to-market that seems to be driving the success of the company. The answers to these questions remain to be seen over the next six months. It is rare that specialized companies buy broad based technology and are able to maintain the go-to-market strategy in place before the acquisition.
Rubrik is a fast growing, leading cybersecurity company. They will continue to help businesses keep their most sensitive data safe from threats like hackers, ransomware, and outages. They will continue to protect and secure critical information so that customers in industries like healthcare, finance, education, and the government, can recover quickly and keep running smoothly, no matter what happens. The question is this: Are they still on a mission to secure the world’s data; or will there be a new mission to accelerate the world’s AI on a foundation of secure data?
Why does this matter to their more than 6,000 organizations running Rubrik? It matters because AI is the future and the future is here. If you are a Rubrik customer, you can be sure that Rubrik will continue to excel in the use of AI. Stay tuned.
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