Data analytics and AI software maker Databricks has raised more than $500M in a Series I round led by funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price.
The deal values the company at $43 Billion, a boost from the $38 Billion valuation Databricks received after raising a $1.6 Billion Series H led by Morgan Stanley's Counterpoint Global in 2021.
The list of investors that participated in this Series makes it look like both a pre-IPO funding round and a strategic investment. Capital from T. Rowe Price, Fidelity and Franklin Templeton fills up the "pre-IPO" portion, as these investors often put money in companies that are expected to go public sooner than later. On the strategic side, Databricks secured investments from Capital One Ventures and Nvidia.
The alliance between Nvidia and Databricks is a significant milestone, reaffirming Databricks unwavering commitment to advancing data processing and generative AI models. Jensen Huang, the visionary founder and CEO of Nvidia, expressed his enthusiasm for the collaboration, calling enterprise data "a goldmine for generative AI".
Traditional private-market investors, including Andreessen Horowitz and Tiger Global, also joined the funding round, indicating widespread confidence in Databricks growth trajectory.
Databricks has exhibited strong financial performance, characterized by a revenue run rate surpassing $1.5 Billion and achieving over 50% year-to-year revenue growth during the second quarter that ended on July 31. Additionally, the company has built a global customer base exceeding 10,000 clients.
Databricks also made a huge acquisition in June, buying OpenAI competitor MosaicML for $1.3 billion.
Founded in 2013 by the original creators of Apache Spark, an open-source unified analytics engine for large-scale data processing, Databricks is known for its "lakehouse" platform in the cloud — a combination of data warehouses and data lakes that unifies data, analytics and AI on a single platform so that customers can govern, manage and derive insights from enterprise data and build their own generative AI solutions faster.
With a valuation of $43 Billion, Databricks stands as one of the highest-valued artificial intelligence companies existing in the United States. Its chief competitor, Snowflake, holds a market value of approximately $51 Billion. It's worth noting that Capital One, one of the firms participating in latest Databricks funding round, is also among Snowflakes's largest corporate clients.
Source: TechCrunch, VentureBeat, Cointelegraph, Crunchbase, PRnewswire
