DevOps / SRE / Platform · 25.08.2026, 15:48 UTC
“You can rent a feature, but you can’t rent a foundation”: why MotherDuck bought the startup already powering its data pipelines
| Schweregrad | info |
|---|---|
| Kategorie | DevOps / SRE / Platform |
| Quelle | The New Stack ↗ |
| Veröffentlicht | 25.08.2026 UTC |
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What do you do when a technology you’ve become dependent on belongs to someone else? You buy the startup behind it, of course. And that’s exactly what data warehouse company MotherDuck has done with Tower, a data infrastructure startup whose technology was already powering MotherDuck’s AI-built data pipelines.
The deal, announced on Tuesday, is MotherDuck’s first acquisition in its four-year history, bringing both Tower’s technology and team in-house as MotherDuck pushes further into AI agents that can build and operate data pipelines.
Tower takes flight
Tower was founded out of Germany in late 2024 by ex-Snowflake engineers Serhii Sokolenko (CEO) and Brad Heller (CTO). Their pitch: once a developer, or an AI assistant, has written the code for a data pipeline, someone still has to package it, deploy it to the right infrastructure, wire up credentials, and maintain it — the unglamorous work, Sokolenko told The New Stack back in March, that amounts to data engineering’s “last mile.”
Tower, essentially, is a managed runtime for Python pipelines — it packages the code, deploys it, and keeps it running in production. It also offers tools built on top of that runtime, like the browser-based AI agent Tower Control that allows users to describe the pipeline they want in plain language.
With Tower Control, users can describe the pipeline they want in plain language.
Control can then generate the code, deploy it as a Tower app, and run it — effectively taking the process from prompt to production without the developer having to set up the underlying runtime …