Electric

Database · AI Infrastructure · Developer Tools

Acquisition

Databricks acquires Postgres startup Electric to power AI agent sandboxes

The deal bets that AI agents need their own tiny local databases, not just access to one big central one.

• Databricks acquired Electric, the startup behind the WASM-based Postgres engine PGlite, for an undisclosed sum on August 11, 2026.
• Electric built PGlite, a full Postgres implementation compiled to WebAssembly that runs inside browsers, Node.js, or sandboxed AI agents, plus a real-time sync engine that mirrors data back to a central database.
• Electric's open-source components—including PGlite, the sync engine, Durable Streams, and TanStack DB—remain open source, but the hosted Electric Cloud service is being wound down.
• PGlite's weekly downloads grew from about 1 million to 13 million over the past 12 months, and Electric had raised roughly $7 million from investors including Spark Capital and Lunar Ventures.
• Electric's team joins Neon, the serverless-Postgres company Databricks bought for roughly $1 billion in early 2025 to form the basis of its Lakebase managed-Postgres product.
• Databricks says agentic applications create roughly four times more databases than human developers do on Lakebase, with projects averaging ten branches and some exceeding 500 branch iterations, often lasting under ten seconds.
• The acquisition shows database vendors racing to own a new infrastructure layer for AI agents: fast, disposable local state that syncs back to a durable central store.