Snowflake to Acquire Crunchy Data to Strengthen AI Agent Business | PYMNTS.com

Snowflake plans to acquire Crunchy Data to enhance its ability to help enterprises build and deploy artificial intelligence (AI) agents and applications.

The planned acquisition will add Crunchy Data’s open-source Postgres technology and products to Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud, the companies said in a Monday (June 2) press release.

The closing of the acquisition is subject to regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions, according to the release.

The planned combination will help add a PostgreSQL database called Snowflake Postgres to the AI Data Cloud, according to the release.

PostgreSQL, or Postgres, is an open-source, relational database that can serve as the underlying database for customers creating AI agents with data stored in the platforms of companies like Snowflake, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported Monday.

It is used by 49% of all developers, according to the Monday press release.

Snowflake Postgres will enable those who use PostgreSQL to ship faster and operate more efficiently, the release said.

“We’re tackling a massive $350 billion market opportunity and a real need for our customers to bring Postgres to the Snowflake AI Data Cloud,” Snowflake Senior Vice President of Engineering Vivek Raghunathan said in the release.

Crunchy Data Co-Founder Paul Laurence said in the release that Crunchy Data’s security and compliance have made it a trusted Postgres partner for organizations in regulated industries.

“We’re excited to join forces with Snowflake to provide their customers who already rely on Postgres the ability to run mission-critical regulated workloads with increased confidence and security on the Snowflake platform,” Laurence said.

Snowflake said in February that it was opening a new Silicon Valley “AI hub” that is designed to give developers, startups and business leaders a place to work on AI efforts.

Data and AI firm Databricks announced May 14 that it was acquiring database startup Neon to boost its AI agent business, saying that Neon is “purpose-built to support [developers’] agentic workflows.”

“By bringing Neon into Databricks, we’re giving developers a serverless Postgres that can keep up with agentic speed, pay-as-you-go economics and the openness of the Postgres community,” Databricks Co-Founder and CEO Ali Ghodsi said at the time in a press release.