“You can rent a feature, but you can’t rent a foundation”: why MotherDuck bought the startup already powering its data pipelines
What do you do when a technology you’ve become dependent on belongs to someone else? You buy the startup behind The post “You can rent a feature, but you can’t rent a foundation”: why MotherDuck bought the startup already powering its data pipelines appeared first on The New Stack .
MotherDuck, a serverless data warehouse company, has acquired Tower, a data infrastructure startup, in order to bolster its AI-built data pipelines. Tower, founded by ex-Snowflake engineers Serhii Sokolenko and Brad Heller in late 2024, provides a managed runtime for Python pipelines, packaging code, deploying it to the right infrastructure, and ensuring it runs in production. Tower also offers tools like the AI agent Tower Control, which allows users to describe pipelines in plain language.
MotherDuck, which was founded in 2022 by Jordan Tigani, was initially looking for a third-party tool to recommend to customers for easier data integration into their warehouses. However, advances in AI transformed their approach, as AI could now handle data problems. This realization led MotherDuck to rely on Tower's technology to run code generated by AI agents, manage credentials, and schedule jobs on a timeframe.
Tigani notes that there's a rule in infrastructure companies that you can rent features, but you can't rent a foundation. As Tower became increasingly central to MotherDuck's operations, the company decided to acquire the startup outright. This acquisition allows MotherDuck to provide its customers with a complete, end-to-end data pipeline solution, as well as an execution layer for the AI agents they develop.
Written by urgent.news from The New Stack's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
