Cloud data company Databricks raises $500m in latest funding round

Databricks secures $500 million in Series I funding

Cloud data company Databricks has successfully completed a Series I fundraising round, raising $500 million from primary investor accounts. The funding was led by T. Rowe, with new investors including Capital One Ventures, Ghisallo Capital Management, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, and Nvidia.

Valuation reaches $43 billion

The latest investment round saw Databricks achieve a valuation of $43 billion dollars, with a share price of $73.50. This comes after the company raised $1.6 billion in Series H funding earlier this year at a valuation of $38 billion.

Databricks expands partnership with Nvidia

Databricks' financial partnership with Nvidia demonstrates an increased synergy between the two artificial intelligence (AI) corporations, with generative AI for enterprise data being the primary driver for the recent raise. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang praised Databricks' work with Nvidia technology to accelerate data processing and generative AI models, calling enterprise data "a goldmine for generative AI."

Introducing Databricks' "Lakehouse" platform

Databricks' flagship product is its "Lakehouse" platform, which combines a data warehouse with a data lake for seamless developer workflow access. The platform allows customers to unify data, analytics, and AI, enabling them to govern, manage, and derive insights from enterprise data. It also provides the ability to build generative AI solutions using a client's internal data, allowing for greater control over privacy and model customization.

Databricks competes with billion-dollar AI companies

With a valuation of $43 billion, Databricks is now one of the highest-valued artificial intelligence companies in the United States, rivaling trillion-dollar competitors such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Cloud, and Google Cloud. Its chief competitor, Snowflake, has a market value of approximately $51 billion. Notably, one of the firms investing in Databricks' latest funding round, Capital One, is also one of Snowflake's largest corporate clients.