DataRobot Boosts Big Data Capabilities with Cursor Acquisition
Big Data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are both lauded as fundamental parts of the digital future, and as they develop, the crossover of these technologies is prompting a wave of acquisitions.
Boston AI startup DataRobot, which helps enterprises build predictive models, has recently announced that it will acquire San Francisco-based data collaboration platform Cursor.
This gives DataRobot the opportunity to expand geographically – by building another office in San Francisco; and technically – by integrating Cursor’s technology into its machine learning solutions suite. This suite, which is famous for predicting which nominated song would win the 2019 Grammy Award for Song of the Year, includes a library of hundreds of open source algorithms that enterprises can use to harness the power of big data to make predictions.
Cursor’s technology is a search tool, which is used by teams at Cisco, Under Armour, LinkedIn, Slack, and Apple to make data more accessible across fragmented computing infrastructure, and ultimately enable the companies to make more data-driven decisions.
“The Cursor technology and team are key pieces of the puzzle for [our] vision of an AI-driven world,” said DataRobot CEO Jeremy Achin. “The Cursor team has architected an incredible platform and shares DataRobot’s mission to build unprecedented levels of automation across the AI pipeline. We’re thrilled to have them on board.”
At less than two years old, Cursor is typical of the young companies being acquired in the wave of consolidation across the AI and machine learning space. As these new companies emerge, they are being picked up very quickly by bigger companies seeking strategic investments. In this vein, DataRobot has boosted its expertise by acquiring several new companies over the past few years. These include Ohio-based Machine Learning firm Nexosis in 2018, which was only three years old at the time, and Boston-based data science software company Nutonian in 2017, which was six years old. Both firms shared DataRobot’s goal of making AI tools accessible to more enterprises.