May 14 (Reuters) - Databricks said on Wednesday it would buy database startup Neon in a

deal valued at about $1 billion, aiming to strengthen its analytics platform with technology

that can help businesses develop and use artificial intelligence agents more easily.

Demand for AI agents, programs that need little human intervention in executing routine

tasks such as writing code or sending emails, has been growing as companies embrace the new

technology to automate workflows and improve efficiency.

Neon's cloud-based platform, based on the PostgreSQL open-source database - a system for

organizing and managing information online - helps developers and AI agents store, access and

manage data in real-time, making it easier to build and deploy AI-powered applications.

"By bringing Neon into Databricks, we're giving developers a serverless Postgres that

can keep up with agentic speed, pay-as-you-go economics, and the openness of the Postgres

community," Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi said in a statement.

Founded in 2021, Neon has partnered with platforms such as Vercel, Replit, Cloudflare ( NET )

, GitHub and Microsoft ( MSFT ) to integrate its serverless PostgreSQL offering into

widely used developer tools and platforms.

Databricks said Neon's team is expected to join the data analytics company after the

transaction closes, without providing a timeline for the deal closure.

"This acquisition will give us the scale and backing to accelerate our mission," Neon

executives said in a blog post.

San Francisco, California-based Databricks, which secured a $62 billion valuation after

raising a whopping $10 billion last year, offers a platform designed to help users ingest,

analyze and build AI applications using complex data from various sources.

Databricks acquired generative AI startup MosaicML in a mostly stock deal valued at $1.3

billion in 2023 and last year said it would buy data-management startup Tabular for more than $1

billion.

More than 10,000 organizations, including Comcast ( CMCSA ), Block, Rivian and

Shell, rely on the company's Databricks Data Intelligence Platform to manage and

analyze data for AI applications, according to the company's website.