While AI has been on the rise for several years, increasingly adopted for personal and business uses alike, the truth is that most enterprise AI projects fall short of reaching production. There are many reasons for this, including data access risks, poor model performance, infrastructure cost, and governance gaps making it difficult to develop effective, secure, and cost-efficient AI solutions.
If the technological functions of AI, especially agentic AI, are to progress any further, there is an urgent need for a unified, secure, and scalable path forward. To this end, American cloud data management and security firm Rubrik has announced an intention to acquire AI developers’ platform Predibase in a move toward accelerating agentic AI adoption.
Why Predibase?
Predibase was founded by AI technologists with experience at Google and Uber with an aim to “remove the common barriers to getting highly tuned and accurate AI, empowering any builder to train specialized models instead of generic mode,” says Devvret Rishi, Co-Founder and CEO of Predibase. The company specializes in fine-tuning open-source models, such as LLMs and other foundation models, into solutions that are highly accurate and ready for production.
The platform has been proven to offer benefits like cost savings of up to 80%, reduced inference time, and more than doubled performance gains. Predibase is designed to simplify and accelerate AI deployment with minimal overhead, helping businesses to develop and implement new AI solutions. It is a platform that enables organizations of all kinds to harness AI power for their own specialized purposes without their AI projects stalling in the process due to the many roadblocks often in the way.
Rubrik’s Strategic Play
Rubrik’s acquisition of Predibase is advantageous for both organizations and the many customers that can benefit from the combination of their abilities. The strength of Rubrik’s business lies primarily in data security and governance as well as a secure, ready-to-use data lake infrastructure. With the addition of a platform designed to help businesses move their AI initiatives into production, Rubrik’s acquisition fills the “execution gap” in AI projects by bridging governed data with accurate and effective models.
The choice to acquire Predibase serves as a strong signal of Rubrik's evolution from data protection to AI-enablement. This is an investment not in a particular AI product, but in the broader growth and advancement of AI capabilities in the future. The acquisition will empower Rubrik and Predibase to “help customers unlock the full potential of AI with their data,” says Rishi.
Agentic AI: The Next Frontier
As many widely used tools and platforms already rely on AI/ML capabilities, experts and organizations are increasingly turning their focus to the evolution of AI agents. Agentic AI systems require trusted data inputs, context awareness, and runtime autonomy in order to be accurate and effective enough. Clear data governance is non-negotiable in agentic AI: enterprises need visibility and guardrails at every stage to protect against a variety of risks.
“When building enterprise systems with AI, the top priority is determining how to leverage Agentic AI capabilities without compromising the integrity and security of data that customers depend on,” according to Arvind Nithrakashyap, CTO and Co-founder at Rubrik. “CTOs today hesitate on AI projects due to concerns around accuracy and cost, as well as how to deploy them securely and most effectively.” With the acquisition of Predibase, Rubrik lays the foundation for safe, explainable, and operational agentic AI.
What It Means for the Industry
This acquisition has far-reaching implications in technology and cybersecurity. There is a new category emerging at the intersection of AI Ops, data governance, and cybersecurity, exemplified by the combination of Predibase and Rubrik’s functionalities and capabilities. This move positions Rubrik alongside other players redefining the AI infrastructure stack, the latest deal in a trend including Snowflake acquiring Neeva and Databricks acquiring MosaicML.
With more and more industry leaders acquiring smaller firms to expand their capabilities and consolidate operations, these acquisitions demonstrate a wider industry pattern. Enterprises may be motivated to increasingly favor integrated solutions that bring AI, security, and infrastructure together.
The Road Ahead
A successful result of this acquisition will involve real-world deployments of AI projects, agentic AI autonomy without chaos, and effective governance without friction. It remains to be seen whether Rubrik will open-source any components and what effects the acquisition will have on the larger landscape of large language model operations. Rubrik’s step toward advancing and empowering agentic AI solutions may be a model for future AI-native acquisitions as organizations look to the future and aim to advance their AI capabilities.
