from Hacker News

Databricks in talks to acquire startup Neon for about $1B

by ko_pivot on 5/5/25, 8:16 PM with 173 comments

• by wqtz on 5/6/25, 5:25 AM

  Databricks acquired bit.io and subsequently shut it down quite fast. Afaik bit.io had a very small team and the founder was a serial entrepreneur who is not going to stick around and he did not. I am not sure who from bit.io is still around at databricks.

  If I am guessing right, Motherduck will likely be acquired by GCP because most of the founding team was ex-BQ. Snowflake purchased Modin and polars is still quite immature to be acquisition ready. So, what does this leave us with. There is also EDB who is competing in enterprise Postgres space.

  Folks I know in the industry are not very happy with databricks. Databricks themselves was hinting people that that they would be potentially acquired by Azure as Azure tries to compete in the data warehouse space. But everyone become an AI company which left Databricks in an awkward space. Their bdev team is not bestest from my limited interactions with them (lots of starbucks drinkers and let me get back to you after a 3 month PTO), so they do not know who or how to lead them to an AI pivot. With cash to burn from overinvestment and the snowflake/databricks conf coming up fast they needed a big announcement and this is that big announcement.

  Should have sobered up before writing this though. But who cares.

• by newfocogi on 5/5/25, 9:18 PM

  They offer serverless Postgres. Here's a link if anyone else needs it https://neon.tech/

• by betteryet on 5/6/25, 10:19 AM

  Neon is a great product because they are run by Postgres enthusiasts. They have decent customer-friendly pricing, real serverless HTTP endpoints, and they're always on the latest version of Postgres as soon as it is stable. From what I can tell, no other provider has this positioning, driven by dedication.

  I really hope they can maintain this dedication after acquisition, but Databricks will probably push them into enterprise and it will lose the spark. I wish Cloudflare bought them instead.

• by jmull on 5/5/25, 9:46 PM

  Wow, $1B.

  I've been bullish on neon for a while -- the idea hits exactly the right spot, IMO, and their execution looks good in my limited experience.

  But I mean that from a technical perspective. I never have any real idea about the business -- do they have an edge that makes people want to start paying them money and keep paying them money? Heck if I know.

  I guess that's going to be Databricks problem now (maybe).

• by impulser_ on 5/6/25, 10:30 AM

  These Postgres, and serverless databases are all so overhyped. I have tried all of them and they all are much slower than just deploying a managed database in the same datacenter as your application.

  I have an application deployed on Railway with a Postgres database and the user's latency is consistent 150ms. The same application deployed on these serverless/edge provider is anywhere between 300-400ms with random spikes to 800ms. The same application, same data, and same query.

  The edge and serverless has to be the biggest scam in cloud industry right now.

  They aren't faster, and they aren't cheaper. You could argue they are easier to scale, but that not he case anymore since everyone provides autoscaling now.

• by forgetfulness on 5/5/25, 11:40 PM

  What is the lowdown on Databricks? Their bread and butter were hosted Spark and notebooks. As tasks done in Spark over a data lake began to be delegated wholesale to columnar store ELT, they tried to pivot to "lake houses", then I sort of lost track of them after I got out of Spark myself.

  Did Delta Lake ever catch on? Where are they going now?

• by datadrivenangel on 5/5/25, 8:42 PM

  Databricks is trying hard to get into serverless, but it seems like they refuse to allow it to actually be cheaper, which defeats the purpose of serverless.

• by thiagoeh on 5/5/25, 11:17 PM

  Looks like the acquihire of Bit.io in 2023 wasn't enough to be able to deliver their own OLTP offering

  https://blog.bit.io/whats-next-for-bit-io-joining-databricks... https://www.databricks.com/blog/welcoming-bit-io-databricks-...

  Or it's just a business decision to corner the market, as someone else said

• by clpm4j on 5/5/25, 9:43 PM

  I've been seriously considering neon for a new application. This definitely gives me pause... maybe plain ol' Postgres is going to be the winner for me again.

• by esadek on 5/6/25, 10:18 AM

  I migrated to Neon from bit.io after Databricks acquired and sunset it. Really hope I won't have to migrate again.

• by yalogin on 5/5/25, 11:22 PM

  A tangential question here, will Databricks ever go public? At this point it's a large company making billion dollar acquisitions.

  For someone looking to join the company, I cannot imagine IPO to be a motivation anymore.

• by markus_zhang on 5/5/25, 11:20 PM

  I'm confused. I saw users left Databricks left and right. Two companies I worked for previously got out of it due to cost.

  Do they still have a lot of $$$?

• by joshstrange on 5/5/25, 11:09 PM

  Well this isn't great news. I quite enjoy using Neon but I doubt it's going to continue to cater to people like me if it's bought by Databricks (from the little I know about them and from looking at their website).

  Thankfully, I just need "Postgres", I wasn't depending on any other features so I can migrate easily if things start going south.

• by beoberha on 5/6/25, 1:14 AM

  Congrats to the Neon team - they make an awesome product. That’s about all the good I can say here. I don’t blame them for selling out. It’s always felt like a “when” not an “if”. I would be surprised if you can make money selling cloud databases - especially when funded by VCs.

• by 999900000999 on 5/5/25, 11:46 PM

  Supabase just raised 200 million.

  What’s with all these Postgres hosting services being worth so much now?

  Someone at AWS probably thought about this, easy to provision serverless Postgres, and they just didn’t build it.

  I’m still looking for something that can generate types and spit it out in a solid sdk.

  It’s amazing this isn’t a solved problem. A long long time ago, I was apart of a team trying to sort this out. I’m tempted to hit up my old CEO and ask him what he thinks.

  The company is long gone…

  If anything we tried to do way too much with a fraction of the funding.

  In a hypothetical almost movie like situation I wouldn’t hesitate to rejoin my old colleagues.

  The issue then, as is today is applications need backends. But building backends is boring, tedious and difficult.

  Maybe a NoSql DB that “understands” the Postgres API?

• by briandear on 5/6/25, 9:54 AM

  Neon is awesome. I hope Databricks doesn’t brick it.

• by crowcroft on 5/6/25, 3:27 AM

  If I'm guessing this either:

  1. An acquihire (if your a Neon customer this would probably be a bad outcome for you).

  2. A growth play. Neon will be positioned as an 'application layer' product offered cheap to bring SaaS startups into the ecosystem. As those growth startups grow and need more services sell them everything else.

• by chachra on 5/5/25, 11:43 PM

  Hope they don't increase the price!!

• by AbstractH24 on 5/7/25, 12:50 AM

  Anyone notice a rapid ramp up in acquisitions?

  As though folks are looking for exits but IPO isn’t an option.

  Think we’re approaching a reckoning for lots of companies that raised circa 2021 at valuations that are no longer plausible and AI startups.

  Oh, and ones in the first group that tried to rebrand as the second…

• by matt-p on 5/8/25, 1:27 PM

  Neon is a interesting product and they've got some great Postgres engineers. Having said that 1 Second cold starts are still quite painful for a website/web app.

  I hope the $19 plans are there to stay - but I somewhat doubt it.

• by taw1285 on 5/5/25, 11:47 PM

  I am fairly new to all this data pipeline services (Databricks, Snowflakes etc).

  Say right now I have an e-commerce site with 20K MAU. All metrics are going to Amplitude and we can use that to see DAU, retention, and purchase volume. At what point in my startup lifecycle do we need to enlist the services?

• by ashvardanian on 5/6/25, 6:08 AM

  Of all the billion-scale investment and acquisition news of the last 24 hours this is the only one that makes sense. Especially after the record-breaking $15B round, that Databricks closed last year.

• by senderista on 5/6/25, 4:00 PM

  AWS just breathed a huge sigh of relief at the neutralization of Aurora's most dangerous competitor.

• by vladich on 5/9/25, 3:40 AM

  Databricks previously invested in Neon through Databricks Ventures btw.

• by anshumankmr on 5/6/25, 2:58 AM

  Great.As someone using Neon, how might this impact me? Price bumps?

• by User23 on 5/6/25, 12:48 AM

  Meanwhile here I am wondering why everyone isn’t using SQLite.

• by outside1234 on 5/5/25, 10:16 PM

  Ok, can we just. How is Databricks an AI unicorn exactly?