Databricks secures $4B funding at $134B valuation amid AI boom
What's the story
Databricks, a leading data intelligence firm, has raised over $4 billion in a Series L funding round. The latest investment values the company at an impressive $134 billion, a 34% increase from its previous valuation of $100 billion just three months ago. This is Databricks' third major fundraising effort in less than a year and comes as it focuses on products catering to the AI revolution.
Product development
Databricks' innovative AI-focused products
Databricks is heavily investing in its Lakebase database for AI agents, a product built on the open-source Postgres database. The company also has Agent Bricks, an AI agent platform that helps businesses build and deploy these agents to access their data. Databricks has also signed multi-million dollar deals with AI labs Anthropic and OpenAI to integrate their models into its enterprise products.
Financial performance
Databricks' revenue growth and future plans
Despite the uncommon nature of Series L rounds, Databricks has managed to raise venture funding at ever-increasing valuations. The company now boasts a run-rate revenue of over $4.8 billion, a 55% increase from last year. Over $1 billion of this revenue comes from its AI products. Databricks plans to use the new capital to help customers build AI apps and agents on their proprietary data, among other things.
Expansion strategy
Global expansion and job creation plans
With the new funding, Databricks plans to create thousands of new jobs in Asia, Europe, and Latin America. The company also intends to hire more AI researchers. "Enterprises are rapidly reimagining how they build intelligent applications, and the convergence of generative AI with new coding paradigms is opening the door to entirely new workloads," said Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and CEO of Databricks.
Investor interest
Databricks' funding round and investor participation
The Series L funding round was led by Insight Partners, Fidelity Management & Research Company, and J.P. Morgan Asset Management. Other investors who participated in this funding round include Andreessen Horowitz, BlackRock, and Blackstone. The San Francisco-based company provides a cloud-based platform for data engineering, analytics, and machine learning to over 20,000 customers globally including Shell, AT&T, Toyota, Adobe, S&P Global, Warner Bros Discovery, and NBA, among others.