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DataRobot acquires open source and AI startup Agnostiq
The acquisition shows the importance of agentic AI for every platform provider. However, Agnostiq is a relatively small company.
AI platform vendor DataRobot revealed on Monday that it acquired startup developer Agnostiq and its open source computing platform Covalent, for an undisclosed sum. DataRobot said the acquisition will help it pursue agentic AI application development.
Founded in 2023, Agnostiq has raised a total of $8.1 million and is best known for its open source platform Covalent. Covalent allows enterprises to scale AI deployments by efficiently using infrastructure and infrastructure abstraction. The technology helps enterprises make infrastructure more straightforward to manage, portable and scalable by hiding the complex part of physical hardware or cloud services.
DataRobot's acquisition of Covalent comes as many AI vendors are trying to enter the fast-growing market for agentic AI, an outgrowth of generative AI that creates autonomous and semi-autonomous agents to carry out enterprise IT processes.
DataRobot and AI agents
“If you’re not providing AI agents, you’re probably going to be out of relevancy pretty soon,” said Futurum Group analyst Dion Hinchcliffe.
All AI platform providers will need to have agentic AI, just as they needed generative AI, according to Forrester Research analyst Mike Gualtieri.
“It’s definitely a step that all of these AI platforms have to take," Gualtieri said. "You cannot be an AI platform and not handle agentic AI."
However, agentic AI requires a different level of capability that DataRobot currently lacks, which is why buying a company like Agnostiq makes sense.
Since agentic AI requires AI systems to work with other computer systems, it requires more expertise than DataRobot currently has, Hinchcliffe said.
With Agnostiq, the vendor said it can now orchestrate such tools as Run:ai and Slurm to execute agentic AI applications. "It breathes a couple more years of life, keeps them on the treadmill, saves them months or years of building up that capability,” Hinchcliffe said.
Open source
Another benefit for DataRobot is that Covalent is open source, especially as more enterprises have become interested in open source systems since the success of open source generative AI models such as Meta Llama and now DeepSeek-R1.
"DataRobot has been known for its easy-to-use tooling, but they haven't been known for their engines on the back end," Gualtieri said. “When you're starting to get into the infrastructure side of things now, it's more of an advantage to say that it's open source."
Open source is also advantageous for DataRobot because some of the independent AI vendor’s competitors, principally Databricks, are based on open source technology.
Some challenges
However, Covalent has not had overwhelming success, Gualtieri said. Moreover, Agnostiq is a small company, with a few dozen employees.
And while DataRobot's acquisition addressed the infrastructure part of agentic AI, it did not address the tooling, Gualtieri said.
Meanwhile, the vendor must also prove it can incorporate Agnostiq's technology.
"They've got to make agents seamless inside DataRobot, or they're going to have a challenge,” Gualtieri said.
Esther Shittu is an Informa TechTarget news writer and podcast host covering artificial intelligence software and systems.
