Databricks acquires 8080 Labs to extend its low-code/no-code capabilities

Databricks today announced that it has acquired German startup 8080 Labs, the company behind bamboolib, a popular GUI for the Python-based Pandas data analysis and manipulation tool. Bamboolib allows data scientists to quickly and easily explore their data and transform it without having to write any code. 8080 Labs offered both a free community edition of bamboolib as well as a paid pro edition with additional enterprise capabilities. Databricks plans to integrate these UI-driven features into its Lakehouse Platform and to expand its own low-code/no-code capabilities.

This marks Databricks’ first acquisition since it closed its $1.6 billion Series H funding round in August. At the time, Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi told us that he wanted to raise this round to be able to go up against its well-capitalized competitors in this space. As is so often the case with fast-growing companies in a competitive space, that often means making acquisitions to buy both the engineering talent and software capabilities to do so.

“Together with last year’s acquisition of Redash, we are broadening the focus of our user base to a wider audience that prefers low-code/no-code solutions. Bringing simple capabilities to Databricks is a critical step in empowering more people within an organization to easily analyze and explore large sets of data, regardless of expertise,” Ghodsi noted in today’s announcement.

For Databricks, this acquisition also marks a renewed emphasis on bringing its platform to citizen data scientists who may not have the expertise to use its tools otherwise. “As data and AI become a strategic priority for businesses of every size, it’s critical that everyone within an organization is empowered to ask questions and take action based on data,” the company notes in today’s announcement. Combined with its automated machine learning tools, Databricks argues, its service will now allow a wider range of users to extract value from their data — and also make life easier for professional developers who can build their data transformations with its UI tools and then export the Python code once they need to build a more custom implementation.

“We founded 8080 Labs to bring simplicity to complex data tasks and make the power of data science and machine learning accessible to data teams of any skill set,” said Tobias Krabel, co-founder of 8080 Labs. “With open-source roots and an incredible vision to reshape the data landscape with the lakehouse category, we see endless opportunities with Databricks and could not be more excited to join the team on this journey.”

The two companies did not disclose the details of the acquisition, and 8080 Labs didn’t raise any outside funding prior to this sale.

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