Databricks Acquires Fennel AI to Boost Real-Time Feature Engineering
Fennel has built a modern, incremental compute engine designed to optimise data pipelines across batch, streaming, and real-time sources
Databricks has recently announced the acquisition of Fennel AI Inc., a startup focused on real-time feature engineering, for an undisclosed sum. The move is aimed at enhancing Databricks’ Data Intelligence Platform by enabling more advanced, real-time data processing capabilities.
Fennel has built a modern, incremental compute engine designed to optimise data pipelines across batch, streaming, and real-time sources. This architecture ensures fresher and more efficient data, which is critical for training high-performance AI models.
Feature engineering—the process of selecting and transforming data features for model training—is becoming increasingly vital as AI and large language models evolve. However, it remains a complex and resource-intensive task, especially when synchronizing batch and real-time data across training and serving environments.
Databricks says Fennel’s platform simplifies this process by offering a fully managed environment that incrementally recomputes only the data that has changed. Its Python-native interface makes it easier for users to create sophisticated features without needing to build data pipelines from scratch or learn new languages.
Founded in 2023 by Nikhil Garg and Abhay Bothra, former AI infrastructure engineers at Meta and Google Brain, Fennel has already gained traction with companies like Cricut, Upwork, and Rippling, supporting use cases from fraud detection to personalised recommendations.
"The incoming Fennel team brings a wealth of experience in modern feature engineering for machine learning applications, with the founding team having led AI infrastructure efforts at Meta and Google Brain. Since its founding in 2022, Fennel has been successful in executing on its vision to make it easy for companies and teams of any size to harness real-time machine learning to build delightful products," Databricks said in a blog post.
The acquisition follows Databricks’ $15 billion funding round in January and aligns with its strategy to expand its AI capabilities through targeted acquisitions. I In February 2025, Datbricks also acquired BladeBridge Inc. in February.
