Databand is a startup developing an observability platform for data and machine learning. Databand had raised $14.5 million before the acquisition.

The purchase of Databand is expected to close in June.

The general manager for data and artificial intelligence at IBM said in a statement that folding Databand into IBM would help the company's customers better identify and fix data issues. Expansion of Databand's observability capabilities for integrations across open source and commercial tools will allow customers to have full flexibility in running Databand either as a service or a self-hosted subscription.

Clients of ours rely on high-quality, trustworthy data to power their processes. Business can grind to a halt when they don't have access to the data they need.

Databand is an addition to IBM's existing observability tools He suggests that Databand could alert engineers when the data they're using to power an analytic system is incomplete, and then explain where the missing data came from and why the system isn't working.

IBM continues to provide its clients and partners with the technology they need to deliver trustworthy data and artificial intelligence at scale.

Databand was founded by Josh Benamram and Victor Shafran. In her profile of the company two years ago, my colleague Ingrid Lunden wrote that Databand presents its data in a single platform with data from other sources. Engineers will be given a view of where anomalies are and the possible reasons for them.

Databand was able to get notable customers like Agoda and FanDuel. Lerer Hippeau was one of the earliest investors.

Benamram said that everyone is impacted when the data platform is not effective. Global brands rely on Databand to detect and resolve bad data surprises before they hurt their business. IBM will help us scale our software and speed up our ability to meet evolving needs of enterprise clients.

The market for data observability is growing fast. The vendor narrative goes that organizations are struggling to manage the health and quality of their data. According to Statista, the sector will increase from $12.98 billion in 2020 to $19.38 billion in 2024 due to the growth of startup companies. In May, investors poured over half a billion dollars into observability startup.

Databand is IBM's fifth acquisition of the year. When he became CEO two years ago, he focused on companies in artificial intelligence, automation, cloud and IT