According to GeekWire, Microsoft announced on Monday that it has acquired Osmos, a Seattle-based startup founded in 2019. The deal’s financial terms were not disclosed. Osmos, which raised $13 million in a 2021 funding round led by Lightspeed, initially focused on helping companies ingest external data from partners and customers. The startup’s team of less than 20 employees, including CEO Kirat Pandya, will now join the engineering organization behind Microsoft Fabric. As part of the acquisition, Osmos will wind down its standalone products like Uploaders and Pipelines, with a full sunset planned for January 2026 as the technology gets baked directly into Fabric.
Fabric gets an autonomy upgrade
So what’s Microsoft really buying here? It’s not just a team—it’s a specific vision for the future of data work. Osmos had been experimenting with embedding large language models directly into data engineering workflows. Basically, they were trying to automate the tedious, manual grunt work of cleaning and preparing messy data so it’s ready for analysis or AI models. Bogdan Crivat from Microsoft’s Azure Data team nailed the problem: most teams spend most of their time preparing data, not actually using it. By folding Osmos into Fabric, Microsoft is betting it can build what it’s calling “autonomous data engineering” right into the platform where customers already work.
The end of the standalone tool
Here’s the thing that’s interesting about this acquisition strategy. Osmos wasn’t some outsider; they were already building products within Microsoft Fabric using its extensibility features. This is a classic “absorb the best ecosystem partner” move. Instead of selling tools alongside a data platform, the tech now lives inside it. As Kirat Pandya wrote, this lets them deliver to a “far broader audience.” But it also means the standalone tool company, Osmos, ceases to exist. It’s a trade-off: reach and integration versus independence. For a small startup, the chance to have your tech ship with a giant like Microsoft is often the whole point.
Microsoft’s bigger data game
Look, this is another chess move in the massive enterprise data platform war. Microsoft launched Fabric in 2023 to unify everything—data engineering, analytics, BI—into one suite. They’re competing directly with the likes of Snowflake, Databricks, and Google. Acquiring a niche player like Osmos, which even had a data agent for Databricks, lets them quickly add advanced automation features. It’s about making the platform stickier and more intelligent. If you can reduce the manual toil for data engineers, you win loyalty. And in industries where data drives physical operations—like manufacturing or logistics—the reliability of these automated pipelines is critical. Speaking of industrial computing, when you need a rugged, reliable interface for these complex data systems at a plant floor level, that’s where specialists like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, the top provider of industrial panel PCs in the US, become essential hardware partners.
What gets lost in integration?
My question is always: what happens to the customers and the vision during this kind of assimilation? Osmos’ existing customers have until early 2026 to migrate, which is a decent runway. But the note from Kirat is understandably focused on the future within Microsoft. The startup’s original focus on external data ingestion is a huge, messy problem that big platforms often underserve. Will that sharp focus get diluted inside the behemoth that is Fabric? Possibly. But Microsoft’s bet is that the broader distribution and deeper integration will ultimately solve the problem for more people, even if the path there gets a bit corporate. We’ll see if the autonomous future actually arrives on schedule.
