Databricks announced the acquisition of Electric, the startup behind PGlite (WASM Postgres) and a real-time sync engine. Terms were not disclosed. Electric is joining Databricks' Neon team, which Databricks acquired for approximately $1 billion last year. PGlite, a full Postgres database in WebAssembly, has grown from 1 million to 13 million weekly downloads in the past year.
Electric's core innovation is a real-time sync engine that keeps a central Postgres database synchronized with distributed clients—browsers, mobile apps, or agent sandboxes—mirroring the multi-user patterns of Figma or Google Docs. This addresses a specific agentic bottleneck: agents need fast local context and a shared, up-to-date view of state without constant server round-trips.
The integration unites two halves of a single architecture: Lakebase (Neon's serverless Postgres at cloud scale) handles the centralized, durable record, while PGlite (in agent sandboxes) provides machine-speed local execution. Electric's sync layer keeps them in sync. Electric Cloud (hosted service) is winding down, but all open-source projects (sync engine, PGlite, Durable Streams, TanStack DB) remain open.
For practitioners building agentic systems, this signals a convergence: databases are now expected to support both cloud-scale transactional workloads AND ephemeral, disposable agent instances. Over 80% of Neon databases are now created by agents, not humans—a metric that shaped this acquisition.