No deal for Snowflake, Reka AI on $1b acquisition: report

Photo credit: Snowflake

The billion-dollar discussions for Snowflake to buy AI startup Reka AI have ended without a deal, Bloomberg reported, citing sources. The report did not disclose additional details.

The deal would have helped boost Snowflake’s business, as it sees generative AI as a key growth driver for its cloud-based data analytics offerings. The company’s revenue growth had slowed due to clients spending less on software, while generative AI remains a burgeoning industry.

Snowflake had also released Arctic, its own large language model, last month.

Reka AI – which was founded by researchers from DeepMind, Google, and Meta – recently launched Reka Core, its first multimodal language model. Working with images, audio, and video, Core is “competitive” with leading models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google across industry-accepted metrics, the company had said.

In a US$58 million funding round from 2023, Reka AI was valued at around US$300 million – one participating investor was Snowflake’s investment wing. Reka AI is based in San Francisco but has two Southeast Asian founders: Singaporean Yi Tay is the company’s chief scientist, while CEO Dani Yogatama grew up in Indonesia.

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