United States – Databricks has announced its intention to acquire Panther, an AI-powered security operations center (SOC) platform, in a move aimed at advancing its security lakehouse strategy and expanding its capabilities in AI-driven cybersecurity.
The proposed acquisition marks Databricks’ third security-related purchase, following its acquisitions of SiftD.ai and Antimatter. The company said the deal is designed to strengthen its vision of the security lakehouse, a model that combines security, IT, and business data into a unified platform for threat detection and response.
Panther provides a cloud-native SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) and AI SOC platform that helps organisations automate security operations workflows. The platform is used by organisations including AI company Anthropic and is designed to support security teams operating in cloud-native and AI-focused environments.
According to Databricks, the acquisition comes as organisations face increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks driven by artificial intelligence. The company argues that traditional SIEM systems are often limited by high costs, fragmented data sources, and manual processes that make it difficult for security teams to analyse all available security data and respond quickly to threats.
“Legacy SIEM was never designed for AI,” said Ali Ghodsi, Co-founder and CEO of Databricks. “Databricks, which has the trust of 70% of the Fortune 500 in data and AI, is doubling down on Lakewatch and our security lakehouse vision. With Panther, we enhance and expand our ability to analyse all data and automate SOC workflows. Together, we can offer the best platform to help defend the world against agentic attacks.”
Panther’s platform focuses on what the company describes as agentic SOC workflows, using AI to automate tasks such as alert triage, investigation, and response. Databricks said integrating Panther’s technology with its existing Lakewatch platform would help organisations investigate a larger volume of security alerts and improve detection of AI-enabled attacks.
“We are thrilled to join Databricks and help accelerate the security lakehouse vision,” said Jack Naglieri, Founder and CEO of Panther. “The SOC is at an inflection point: AI is changing how attacks are launched and defenders can now finally keep pace with them. Together with Databricks, we can arm defenders with sophisticated agents that scale detection, investigation, and response.”
Databricks launched Lakewatch earlier this year as part of its broader security strategy. The platform is designed to centralise large volumes of structured and unstructured security data while supporting AI-assisted threat detection and response workflows.
The company said Panther will contribute several capabilities to that vision, including more than 100 pre-built integrations across cloud infrastructure, identity providers, endpoints, networks, and SaaS applications. Panther’s engineering and security operations team is also expected to join Databricks as part of the transaction.
Commenting on Panther’s role within its security operations, Tim Nguyen, Head of Defense at Anthropic, said: “Building frontier AI requires security operations that are programmable and deeply integrated with the way modern engineering teams work. Panther has helped us bring a software engineering approach to detection and response, giving our team the flexibility to adapt quickly as our environment evolves.”
Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. The transaction remains subject to customary closing conditions.
