Databricks adds Responsive to accelerate its Lakebase and Neon Postgres work

Responsive announced on October 9 that it is joining Databricks, with the team set to speed up development of Lakebase and Neon. Its work centers on OpenData, a suite of online databases built on object storage, and on SlateDB, an open source embedded storage engine. The company did not state a price. Databricks bought Neon for about $1 billion in 2025 and added Electric and Row Zero during 2026. The Row Zero purchase came with a stated plan to keep looking for further startups, which points to a steady pace of tuck-in deals around its database and data tools. For AI infrastructure founders, the signal is that the database layer for agents is consolidating into large data platforms. Teams building on object storage or serverless Postgres should expect buyers to pay for engineers who understand agent workloads, and should plan integration paths with the major platforms early.