Exploring the Enterprise GenAI Landscape

Databricks’ $1.3B Acquisition and Snowflake’s Partnerships

5 min readJun 28

How is MosaicML worth $1.3Billion dollars? What’s their core business? Between Databricks’s acquisition and Snowflake’s Nvidia and Reka partnerships, what is going on in the enterprise Generative AI world?

Mosaic

As you may already have heard, Databrick recently announced its acquisition of a large language model company MosaicML for $1.3 Billion, this is by far the biggest acquisition in the generative AI world. The crazy thing is this startup is only 2 years old with only has 62 employees, which means it’s virtually $21 million dollars per employee. I bet the two founders are really happy now. So who are the brilliant founders of this company?

Mosaic Founders

The CEO and co-founder Naveen Rao had his first startup Nervana Systems from 2014 to 2016. It provides an open-source deep learning framework Neon and a full-stack software-as-a-service platform called Nervana Cloud that enabled businesses to develop custom deep learning software. It got acquired by Intel for $400 million also after 2 years of life. Then Naveen went to work for Intel for a few years before founding Mosaic. The CTO and Co-Founder Hanlin Tang used to work with Nervana System and then also went to Intel before founding Mosaic.

What does MosaicML offer?

MosaicML was launched in 2021, currently has 62 employees, and has raised $64 million to date. So its $1.3 billion acquisition really feels absurd. Remind me of the 800 million Streamlit acquisition by Snowflake a year earlier. We will talk more about Snowflake later. But now, how does this $1.3B prize tag make sense? Let’s take a look at what MosaicML offers:

MPT models: most people got to know MosaicML from its open-source MPT models. MosaicML launched MPT-7B model last month and launched the updated MPT-30B models just a few days ago.

Open-source: Unlike many other semi-open-source models like LLama, Alpaca, Vicuna, and Koala that are not okay to be used commercially. MPT models can be used commercially.