Analyst(s): Krista Case
Publication Date: July 14, 2025
Rubrik plans to acquire Predibase for roughly $100 million, adding fine-tuning and serving of open-source small language models (SLMs) on proprietary data to its portfolio. This move builds on Rubrik’s Annapurna managed RAG service and positions the company to compete not only with data protection peers such as Cohesity and Veeam but also with AI data pipeline providers such as Databricks and Snowflake. While it could help enterprises turn backup data into AI-ready assets, success will hinge on Rubrik’s ability to engage new technical buyers beyond its traditional security and IT base.
Key Points:
- Rubrik plans to acquire Predibase for around $100 million, adding fine-tuning and serving of open‑source small language models (SLMs) on proprietary data to its portfolio.
- The move positions Rubrik beyond data backup and cyber‑resilience into the AI data pipeline space, building on its earlier Annapurna RAG service to help customers operationalize protected data for generative AI.
- This strategy could expand Rubrik’s competitive scope to include AI data platform providers such as Databricks and Snowflake, but it also requires winning over new technical buyers, such as data science and AI/ML teams.
Overview:
Rubrik has announced plans to acquire Predibase, a startup focused on helping enterprises fine-tune and serve open-source small language models (SLMs) on proprietary data. The deal is reportedly valued near $100 million.
Predibase provides a managed platform designed to automate customization, deployment, and monitoring of SLMs, aiming to deliver faster performance and lower infrastructure costs than proprietary model hosting services such as Anthropic and OpenAI. The platform includes tools for cost-efficient deployment, robust access controls, and quality monitoring to support more secure and governed use of AI.
This acquisition builds on Rubrik’s December 2024 launch of Annapurna, a managed Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) service. Annapurna enables secure export of enterprise data from backup stores—spanning on-premises, cloud infrastructure, and SaaS applications—for use in generative AI and agentic AI platforms, including Amazon Bedrock, Azure OpenAI Service, and Google Agentspace. Annapurna was introduced to help customers unlock value from their protected data by safely integrating it into AI pipelines and applications.
Other major data protection vendors have also been moving to integrate AI features closer to backup data. Cohesity has developed Gaia, an AI-powered assistant that allows IT and compliance teams to search and summarize data protected within Cohesity, though it currently keeps data and AI use cases within the Cohesity environment. Separately, Veeam recently announced support for Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP), which enables backup data to be accessed securely by external AI agents, vector databases, and large language model (LLM) pipelines. This approach makes protected data more usable in broader AI workflows, though it does not include built-in fine-tuning of AI models.
The acquisition of Predibase signals Rubrik’s broader strategy to evolve beyond its traditional position in data backup and cyber resilience. With Annapurna and Predibase together, Rubrik aims to become a secure data lakehouse and AI enablement platform, helping enterprises not only protect their data but also use it to build and run custom AI applications.
By expanding into fine-tuning and model serving, Rubrik will enter a market also served by AI data pipeline and orchestration providers such as Databricks, Snowflake, Pinecone, and Weaviate. These vendors help enterprises operationalize proprietary data for AI use cases, making data searchable, retrievable, and usable in custom generative AI applications. Rubrik’s move reflects growing demand among enterprises to use backup and protection data as a strategic resource for AI—beyond its historical role as an archive for compliance or disaster recovery.
The planned acquisition would also bring new technical expertise to Rubrik’s team, as Predibase was founded by Google and Uber AI alumni with experience in open-source model tools and infrastructure. Together, these developments underscore how data protection vendors are looking to redefine their value in the enterprise AI era.
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For more detailed insights, see Rubrik’s press release.
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Author Information
Krista Case brings over 15 years of experience providing research and advisory services and creating thought leadership content. Her vantage point spans technology and vendor portfolio developments; customer buying behavior trends; and vendor ecosystems, go-to-market positioning, and business models. Her work has appeared in major publications including eWeek, TechTarget and The Register.
