OpenAI Acquires Rockset To Boost Its Enterprise AI

OpenAI has taken over Rockset, which is known for building tools to drive real-time search and data analytics. In an official blog post, OpenAI said that it would be integrating Rockset's technology to “power [its] infrastructure across products.” Members of Rockset’s team will join OpenAI and its existing customers will be moved from Rockset’s platform “gradually.” The financial details of the deal are yet to be disclosed.

“Rockset’s infrastructure empowers companies to transform their data into actionable intelligence,” OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap said in a statement. “We’re excited to bring these benefits to our customers by integrating Rockset’s foundation into OpenAI products.”

Rockset, which was founded in 2016 by ex-Facebook engineers Venkat Venkataramani and Tudor Bosman and database architect Dhruba Borthakur, created tools that enabled firms to ingest data from databases and public cloud storage services and use that data for search and analytics apps.

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How Will Rockset’s Database Help OpenAI?

Rockset’s database platform underpinned this such as recommendation engines, logistics-tracking dashboards, and chatbots in domains like e-commerce and fintech, something OpenAI is interested in.

Rockset managed to raise funds of over $117.5 million from investors including Icon Ventures, Sequoia, and Greylock before the takeover, according to Crunchbase data. It also had big customers like Meta and JetBlue, which used the company as a component of its flight delay predictions chatbot.

So what will OpenAI build with Rockset’s technology? The blog post mentions enabling companies to “better leverage their own data” and “access real-time information” as they use OpenAI products. Users can imagine improved tooling to “ground” OpenAI’s models on a company’s data, perhaps towards trimming hallucinations or fine-tuning the model for any number of business use cases.

“Advanced retrieval infrastructure like Rockset will make AI apps more powerful and useful,” he writes. “Rockset will become part of OpenAI and power the retrieval infrastructure backing OpenAI’s product suite. We’ll be helping OpenAI solve the hard database problems that AI apps face at a massive scale,” Venkataramani said in the blog post accompanying the announcement.

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Rockset Could Fit Into OpenAI’s Broader Strategy

The Rockset acquisition fits into OpenAI’s broader strategy of investing in its enterprise sales and tech organizations. In May, the company signed an agreement with PwC to resell its tools to other businesses. Before that, OpenAI launched a business-oriented custom model tuning program.

The moves seem to be paying off, with OpenAI’s annualized revenue reportedly set to go past $3.4 billion in 2024. The company recently disclosed that the enterprise tier of its viral AI-powered chatbot platform, ChatGPT had around 600,000 users, which includes 93% of all Fortune 500 firms.