IBM acquiring Israeli data observability startup Databand

Acquisition is IBM’s first in Israel since 2013.

By Meir Orbach, CTech

IBM is acquiring Israeli data observability startup Databand,ai. The companies didn’t disclose the value of the transaction, but Hebrew media reports indicate it to be around $150 million.

Founded in 2018 by CEO Josh Benamram, Victor Shafran, and CTO Evgeny Shulman, the Tel Aviv-based Databand has developed a unified data pipeline observability solution that’s purpose-built for data engineers. Databand’s open and extendable approach allows data engineering teams to easily integrate and gain observability into their data infrastructure, helping organizations fix issues with their data, including errors, pipeline failures, and poor quality — before it impacts their bottom-line.

The startup has raised around $15 million to date and employs approximately 40 people. Its investors include Accel, Blumberg Capital, Lerer Hippeau, Ubiquity Ventures, Differential Ventures, F2 Venture Capital, and Bessemer Venture Partners. Databand’s employees will join IBM’s Data and AI division.

The news further strengthens IBM’s software portfolio across data, AI, and automation to address the full spectrum of observability and helps businesses ensure that trustworthy data is being put into the right hands of the right users at the right time.

Databand is IBM’s fifth acquisition of 2022, but its first in Israel for many years. The company’s last significant purchase of an Israeli company was Trusteer, acquired for hundreds of millions of dollars in 2013.

As the volume of data continues to grow at an unprecedented pace, organizations are struggling to manage the health and quality of their data sets, which is necessary to make better business decisions and gain a competitive advantage.

A rapidly growing market opportunity, data observability is quickly emerging as a key solution for helping data teams and engineers better understand the health of data in their system and automatically identify, troubleshoot, and resolve issues, like anomalies, breaking data changes, or pipeline failures, in near real-time.

“You can’t protect what you can’t see, and when the data platform is ineffective, everyone is impacted –including customers,” said Josh Benamram, Co-Founder and CEO, Databand.ai. “That’s why global brands such as FanDuel, Agoda, and Trax Retail already rely on Databand.ai to remove bad data surprises by detecting and resolving them before they create costly business impacts.”

World Israel News staff contributed to this report.