Databricks has made a significant move by acquiring Electric, the developer behind PGLite and the Electric Sync Engine. This acquisition aims to enhance Databricks’ Postgres capabilities, extending its functionality from the lakehouse to edge environments. PGLite provides each agent with its own lightweight Postgres instance, ensuring ultra-low latency access to local context. Meanwhile, Electric’s real-time sync engine facilitates the synchronization of distributed state back to a central Lakebase, enabling seamless collaboration among teams of agents without losing shared context.
Electric’s Origins and Growth
Founded in September 2021 by CEO James Arthur and co-founders Valter Balegas, Kyle Matthews, and Sam Willis, Electric has rapidly evolved. Matthews transitioned to the role of Chief Product Officer in May 2024 after serving as CTO at GatsbyJS. Balegas joined in March 2022, while Willis came on board in August 2023 as a founding engineer. The company has successfully raised million in funding from 18 angel investors and five venture capital firms, including Spark Capital and Lunar Ventures.
Electric’s flagship product, PGLite, is a Web Assembly (WASM) version of Postgres that operates within a browser tab or application, supporting dynamic extension loading. Initially conceived as a proof of concept by Neon co-founder Stas Kelvich, PGLite has transformed into a widely adopted database, boasting an impressive increase in weekly downloads from 1 million to 13 million over the past year.
Innovative Open-Source Offerings
In addition to PGLite, Electric has developed three notable open-source products:
- Electric Agents: A runtime for long-lived agents that function as durable, synced entities, allowing for resumable operations across devices and observability across teams.
- Electric Streams: A data primitive designed for agent loops, offering persistent, addressable, real-time streams that serve as a flexible tool for managing session data.
- Electric Sync: The core sync engine technology, which enables partial replication and data delivery from Postgres to clients over HTTP.
Databricks previously acquired Neon in May 2022 for billion, aiming to deliver serverless Postgres solutions. This strategic move was intended to bolster its support for agentic and AI-native application developers, as a significant portion of databases provisioned on Neon were created automatically by AI agents. Ali Ghodsi, Co-Founder and CEO of Databricks, emphasized the importance of this acquisition in providing developers with a serverless Postgres solution that aligns with the rapid pace of agentic applications.
Enhancing Collaboration and Scalability
The Electric Sync Engine, part of Databricks’ Neon unit, plays a crucial role in maintaining continuous synchronization between a central Postgres database and various connected clients, including browser tabs and mobile applications. This technology is essential for collaborative products, akin to those offered by Google Docs and Figma, ensuring that state remains synchronized across fleets of agents.
With the integration of Electric’s sync technology and local execution capabilities, Databricks aims to provide a robust backend for agentic applications. The combination of Lakebase’s scalable Postgres and PGLite’s lightweight databases equips agents with the necessary tools for rapid development and deployment across diverse workloads. The Electric team will collaborate closely with Databricks’ Neon team to further enhance backend capabilities, promising exciting developments for customers in the agentic application space.
As the landscape of application development continues to evolve, the synergy between Electric and Databricks positions them to meet the growing demands of developers transitioning from traditional applications to more dynamic, agent-driven environments.
