MotherDuck buys its own pipeline engine Tower in first-ever acquisition
What's the deal? Data warehouse company MotherDuck has acquired TowerDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, a data infrastructure startup whose technology already powered MotherDuck's AI-built data pipelines. Announced Tuesday, the deal brings Tower's technology and team in-house. Terms were not disclosed.
The players: MotherDuck is a serverless data warehouse built on the open-source database DuckDBDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, founded in 2022 by Jordan Tigani, a former GoogleDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → engineering lead on BigQueryDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →. It has raised some $100 million since inception. Tower, founded in Germany in late 2024 by ex-Snowflake engineers Serhii Sokolenko and Brad Heller, offers a managed runtime that packages, deploys, and runs Python pipelines in production.
Why now? The acquisition is MotherDuck's first in its four-year history. It comes as the company pushes deeper into AI agents that build and operate data pipelines.
What's the endgame? Tower supplied the execution layer behind Flights, MotherDuck's June feature that lets AI agents create, run, and schedule pipelines. MotherDuck had first sought a third-party tool to recommend to customers, then changed course as AI reshaped the problem.
“When AI suddenly started to be able to solve data problems, we realized we were thinking about the problem wrong,” Tigani said. “ClaudeDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → can solve that problem we were trying to address by writing the connectors to help people move their data, but what it can't do is the sandboxing and scheduling.”
The team: The deal brings Tower's founders in-house, including CEO Sokolenko and CTO Heller. Their pitch had been solving data engineering's “last mile” — packaging, deploying, and maintaining pipeline code after it is written. Tower let MotherDuck ship Flights “in only a matter of weeks,” Tigani said, and MotherDuck became Tower's largest customer “almost overnight.”
The signal: The acquisition reflects how AI agents are shifting the value in data tooling from writing code to safely running it — sandboxing, scheduling, and credential management. Rather than keep renting that layer, MotherDuck chose to own it.
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