Nvidia AI partner Databricks raises over $500M, boosting valuation to $43B

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

Blockstream Raises $125M to Expand Crypto Mining Services

Digital asset infrastructure company Blockstream has raised $125 million to expand its Bitcoin mining facilities amid strong demand for hosting.

The $125 million raise was financed by convertible note and a secured loan. Venture capital firm Kingsway Capital led the convertible note raise, with additional participation from Fulgur Ventures. Cohen & Cohen Capital Markets, part of J.V.B. Financial Group, advised Blockstream on the deal. 

According to the press release, Blockstream will use the capital raised to expand its mining facilities "in order to meet the strong demand for its institutional hosting services," which they claim remains high "due to the company's strong track record and substantial scale, coupled with an industry-wide shortage of available power capacity." 

This raise follows Blockstream's August 2021 raise of $210 million which valued the company at $3.2 billion. The company utilized the previous round to build several mining facilities with the capacity for institutional hosting customers, along with the strengthening of Blockstream's vertical integration for ASIC manufacturing. 

"This fundraise allows us to accelerate the YoY revenue growth we created with our 2021 Series B and continue to build infrastructure for the future Bitcoin economy," Erik Svenson, Blockstream President and CFO, commented. "We remain focused on reducing risk for institutional Bitcoin miners and enabling enterprise users to build high-value use cases on the most secure, robust, and scalable blockchain in the world - Bitcoin."

Blockstream's new funding round didn't mention the valuation of the company. However, in Dec. 7 last year, Bloomberg reported the company is seeking to raise funds at a 70% lower valuation than in its previous round under $1 Billion. 

Hosting is a service that data centers provide to crypto miners so customers can store their mining rigs and mine digital assets for a fee. The service has been a popular way for miners to earn bitcoin rewards without having to sink a large amount of capital into building out infrastructure, as crypto winter has weighed heavily on the industry and capital markets have been essentially inaccessible for many. 

Blockstream was founded in 2014 with a focus on building infrastructure and applications based upon the Bitcoin Network. The firm was co-funded by CEO Adam Back (inventor of Hashcash, a system for discouraging spam emails that influenced Satoshi Nakamoto's proof-of-work consensus mechanism design for Bitcoin) and nine others, including Bitcoin Core developer Gregory Maxwell. The company has over 500 megawatts of power capacity underway for its mining services. 

It is also the developer of decentralized market technology Liquid Network, which enables trustless Bitcoin swap settlements and helps financial institutions to tokenize assets. The company also plans to expand its renewable energy mining products and continue developing its own Bitcoin mining machine. 

Source: Coindesk, Cointelegraph, Decrypt, Bitcoin Magazine, PRWeb