Rockset (Acquired by OpenAI)

Rockset is a search and analytics provider founded by two past Facebook employees (Dhruba Borthakur and Venkat Venkataramani). The founders developed Rockset as a response to the data scaling, database usage, and analytics constraints faced by Facebook, as the number of Facebook users grew exponentially. Rockset allows companies to leverage databases effectively and to build apps using the data on a real-time basis, which ensures that the database offers more than just storage. This is especially useful for applications that are data driven, such as social media sites.

Rockset’s product caters to multiple verticals such as personalization, Internet of Things (IoT), data science, security analytics, and machine learning. Accordingly, the company has a wide customer base ranging from very large enterprises such as Intel, Deloitte, Bosch, and Nvidia, to startups such as Standard Cognition and Full Creative. Rockset leverages a strong base of integrations to cloud services (such as Amazon Kinesis, S3, and REDSHIFT) that developers can search, aggregate, and join data from. Rockset also has multiple dashboard integrations, such as Apache Superset, and APIs and SDK (software development kits) that developers can use.

Rockset was acquired by OpenAI in June 2024. While Rockset would continue to serve its customers, it would gradually transition existing customers off its platform as it aligns more closely with OpenAI's infrastructure and goals. This acquisition aimed to enhance OpenAI's offerings, particularly in real-time data access and analytics for AI applications.

Key customers and partnerships

Rockset continues to improve its products and form partnerships with data sources. For example, it partnered with database platform MongoDB in May 2020 to offer real-time SQL (programming language) for MongoDB, which aims to improve the offering for developers. The company announced new features in July 2020 that separates computing and storage, which makes the platform faster and cheaper, and more appropriate for the serverless market.

In December 2020, Rockset partnered with the low-code platform Retool to enable users to build more efficient internal tools for multiple purposes, including customer support, marketing, fraud investigations, and logistics monitoring, in a shorter period of time. In March 2022, Rockset added integrations to Microsoft Azure to support real-time ingestion from Azure Blob Storage, Azure Event Hubs, and Azure Service Bus. This enables Rockset to ingest data in bulk without needing real-time data pipelines or ETL tools, regardless of whichever hyperscaler is used by an enterprise.