Since July 2023, there have been many acquisitions where data infrastructure or enterprise software companies bought AI/tooling firms to stay competitive in the AI market, matching Friedberg’s prediction that “there are more acquisitions still to come.”

Examples include:

• Databricks (a leading data/AI platform) continued buying AI-related tooling companies after MosaicML, including Tabular (a data-management system used by open‑source AI) in 2024 and later Tecton, a machine‑learning/feature‑store startup, in 2025 to strengthen its AI‑agent capabilities. (en.wikipedia.org)
• Snowflake followed its Neeva deal with the acquisition of Crunchy Data, a PostgreSQL startup, explicitly to enhance its ability to help customers build AI agents on their own data. (wsj.com)
• Nvidia, an AI infrastructure leader, acquired OctoAI (formerly OctoML), a generative‑AI tools company, as part of a strategy to offer an end‑to‑end enterprise generative‑AI stack. (forbes.com)
• S&P Global (enterprise data and analytics software) acquired ProntoNLP, a provider of generative‑AI tooling used to derive insights from structured and unstructured data, integrating it into its Market Intelligence software division. (prnewswire.com)
• Enterprise SaaS/platform companies such as Shopify (acquiring AI search startup Vantage Discovery), Advisor360° (acquiring generative‑AI meeting‑notes firm Parrot AI), and Workato (acquiring generative‑AI support‑automation platform DeepConverse) similarly bought AI tooling startups to deepen their AI capabilities for customers. (businessinsider.com)
• Data‑infrastructure provider Oxylabs acquired web‑scraping startup ScrapingBee while building out AI‑powered tools like OxyCopilot and AI Studio, further illustrating infra companies buying AI‑enhanced tooling. (en.wikipedia.org)

These and other deals in 2024–2025 are directly in line with Friedberg’s claim that companies similar to Databricks and Snowflake would need to “strap on tools like this” via further AI/tooling M&A, so the prediction has come true.