Databricks, the data and AI platform company, announced on June 16, 2026, at its Data + AI Summit, that it had agreed to acquire Panther, a San Francisco startup that sells an AI-driven platform for security operations centres (SOCs).
Financial terms were not disclosed. The deal was subject to customary closing conditions, including any required regulatory clearances. Databricks said in a blog post on August 3, 2026 that it had completed the acquisition.
Databricks plans to combine Panther with Lakewatch, the security lakehouse it launched in March 2026, and to welcome the Panther team. Jack Naglieri, Panther's founder and chief executive, co-wrote the post announcing the completed deal.
What Panther built
Panther's roots are in StreamAlert, an open-source security monitoring project that Naglieri led at Airbnb. The company built a cloud-native alternative to security information and event management (SIEM) systems, the tools that collect logs from across a company and raise alerts about attacks.
Its platform connects to more than 100 prebuilt data sources, from cloud infrastructure and identity providers to endpoints, networks and SaaS applications, without heavy manual mapping. Security engineers write detection rules as code, so they can version, test and deploy them through the same CI/CD pipelines used for software. It also runs agentic workflows that triage alerts, gather context and suggest next steps for analysts.
Verdict reported that Panther's engineering team includes former SOC analysts and people with experience in open-source and cloud-native security. The company also offers large-scale analytics over security data, so analysts can search long histories of logs during an investigation.
Anthropic is a customer. "Panther has helped us bring a software engineering approach to detection and response," said Tim Nguyen, Anthropic's head of defense. In 2021 the company named Dropbox, Zapier and Snyk among its customers, according to reports at the time of its Series B.
“Legacy SIEM was never designed for AI.”
Why Databricks is buying
Databricks has been pushing into security by arguing that security data belongs in the same lakehouse as a company's other data, rather than in a separate, costly SIEM. Lakewatch, introduced in March 2026, unifies security, IT and business data in one governed architecture. Panther adds mature SOC workflows and a detection engine on top of it.
"Legacy SIEM was never designed for AI," said Ali Ghodsi, Databricks' co-founder and chief executive. "Together, we can offer the best platform to help defend the world against agentic attacks."
Naglieri said the SOC was "at an inflection point" because AI is changing how attacks are launched, and that with AI agents for detection, investigation and response, defenders "can now finally keep pace with them."
The founders and the funding
Panther raised a $15 million Series A in September 2020. In December 2021 it raised a $120 million Series B led by Coatue Management at a $1.4 billion valuation, which brought its total funding to $140 million. ICONIQ Growth and Snowflake Ventures joined that round as new investors, and Lightspeed Venture Partners, S28 Capital and Innovation Endeavors returned.
At the time, Panther said its customer base had grown by 300% over the previous year. Databricks did not say whether the purchase price was above or below that 2021 valuation.
Databricks' third security deal
Panther is the third security company Databricks has agreed to buy, after Antimatter and SiftD.ai. The deal comes after Databricks completed more than $7 billion of new financing earlier in 2026, including about $5 billion of equity at a $134 billion valuation and about $2 billion of additional debt capacity, Verdict reported.
Ghodsi said Databricks, which he said has the trust of 70% of the Fortune 500 in data and AI, was "doubling down on Lakewatch." After closing, Databricks said Panther customers could keep petabytes of security data in open formats that remain under their own control and accessible from other tools.
