Databricks acquires cyberattack detection startup Panther
Databricks Inc. today announced plans to acquire Panther Labs Inc., a startup with an artificial intelligence platform for detecting cyberattacks.
The companies didn’t disclose the financial terms. Panther received a $1.4 billion valuation in a 2021 funding round that included contributions from Snowflake Ventures, Coatue and other prominent backers.
Understanding the scope of a cyberattack requires a reviewing a significant amount of telemetry. However, organizations often have only partial data about breaches because collecting all the necessary information can be prohibitively expensive. Panther’s platform includes filters that remove noise from telemetry streams, which reduces costs and thereby makes it possible to collect more high-value breach data.
The platform not only gathers telemetry but also organizes it in a format that eases analysis. From there, Panther scans the data for threats using customer-provided detections. A detection is a snippet of code designed to spot a specific type of malicious activity. Some companies have upwards of hundreds of such code snippets.
