- MariaDB entered into an agreement to acquire in-memory computing specialist GridGain to deliver sub-millisecond data performance for agentic AI workloads
- The deal targets the "AI Latency Gap" — the growing mismatch between what agentic AI demands from data systems and what conventional relational databases can provide
- The combined platform positions MariaDB as an open, integrated alternative to Oracle and the hyperscalers across transactional, analytical and AI workloads
AI is driving a lot of organizations to feel like Maverick and Goose in "Top Gun." They're feeling the need — the need for speed. Until now, the highest-performing transaction systems were only required in a few vertical industries, such as telecom, financial transactions and transportation and logistics.
Now, AI is making low-latency database response time a mainstream requirement. Agentic AI is becoming capable of doing work that only people can do today — and do it much faster. An agentic AI can do work in seconds that would require hours for a human to do, vastly increasing performance demand for the database systems required to do that work. Multiply that demand by millions of agents operating continuously around the clock, and conventional relational databases can't keep up — like passenger planes tasked to perform like jet fighters.
"The whole cycle is compressed down," Vikas Mathur, chief product officer for open source relational database provider MariaDB, told Fierce. "It's both an explosion of data volume and shrinkage of the time you have to respond to it."
To meet that demand, MariaDB plans to announce Monday that it has entered into an agreement to acquire GridGain, which develops in-memory computing and created Apache Ignite, an open source distributed database and computing platform designed for high-speed, large-scale data processing. The acquisition is the latest step in MariaDB's 18-month campaign to close what it calls the "AI Latency Gap" — AI's need for transactional speed. MariaDB brings reliability while GridGain provides sub-millisecond in-memory speed and scalability to hundreds of nodes.
The combined company's customers include Reliance Jio, Telecom Italia, Verizon, Nokia and Virgin Media OT in the telecom industry, as well as American Express, Deutsche Bank, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, American Airlines, UPS and more.
MariaDB's origin story
MariaDB was founded by Ulf Michael "Monty" Widenius, who was the main author of MySQL, which was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 2008. Widenius left when Oracle acquired Sun in 2009, and hard-forked MySQL to found MariaDB. K1 Investment Management acquired MariaDB in 2024 and brought in a new management team.
The GridGain acquisition is the latest in a series for MariaDB. It acquired Codership, which provides Galera Cluster for high availability and then SkySQL for database-as-a-service, to bring MariaDB from on-premises to the cloud.
MariaDB faces a broad range of competitors, including Oracle, the hyperscalers as well as Hazelcast, Redis and PostgreSQL. Additionally, VAST Data is building a data platform for trustworthy AI. MariaDB competes by providing an integrated solution offering performance, scalability and high availability, Mathur said.
The value of the acquisition was not disclosed.
This article was corrected to report that the acquisition is still pending.