As a part of the acquisition, the Okera team will join forces with Databricks.

San Francisco-headquartered Okera, which was founded in 2016 by Amandeep Khurana and Nong Li, has raised over $29 million in funding from investors such as Bessemer Venture Partners, Alumni Ventures, and Felicis.

Databricks today announced that it has acquired Okera, a data governance platform with a focus on AI. The two companies did not disclose the purchase price. According to Crunchbase, Okera previously raised just under $30 million. Investors include Felicis, Bessemer Venture Partners, Cyber Mentor Fund, ClearSky and Emergent Ventures.Data governance was already a hot topic, but the recent focus on AI has highlighted some of the shortcomings of the previous approach to it, Databricks notes in today’s announcement. “Historically, data governance technologies, regardless of sophistication, rely on enforcing control at some narrow waist layer and require workloads to fit into the ‘walled garden” at this layer,’ the company explains in a blog post. That approach doesn’t work anymore in the age of large language models (LLMs) because the number of assets is growing too quickly (in part because so much of it is machine-generated) and because the overall AI landscape is changing so quickly, standard access controls aren’t able to capture these changes quickly enough.Okera then uses an AI-powered system that can automatically discover and classify personally identifiable information, tag it, and apply rules to this (with a focus on the metadata), using a no-code interface.As the Databricks team stressed, that’s one of the reasons the company was interested in acquiring Okera, but the other is the service’s isolation technology, which can enforce governance control on arbitrary workloads without any major overhead