Databricks valued at $138B after $4B funding round

Databricks has raised more than $4 billion in an L round of venture funding, valuing the data warehousing and analytics company at $138 billion.

By comparison, competitor Snowflake has a market capitalization of about $75.5 billion. Databricks was keen to show its growth credentials as a way of justifying this 12th round of funding in the 12 years since it was founded in 2013, one year after Snowflake. It has crossed $4.88 billion in revenue run rate, is growing at more than 55 percent year-on-year, and has been cash flow-positive for 12 months.

Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and CEO, said: “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. With this investment, we’re deepening our commitment to help every organization innovate with AI on their own data.”

Its data warehousing business generates more than $1 billion revenue a year, four years after becoming generally available, as do its AI products. Its Lakebase product, just six months old, has thousands of customers and is growing revenue “at twice the pace of its Data Warehousing product.”

Last year, when it raised $10 billion in a J round, Databricks had more than 500 customers with more than $1 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR). Now it has more than 700. Its net retention rate is more than 140 percent as existing customers spend more money with Databricks over time.

The new cash will help fund three strategic product developments:

• Lakebase serverless PostgreSQL database purpose-built for the age of AI.
• Databricks Apps to build and deploy data and AI applications.
• Agent Bricks for organizations to build and scale agents working on their data.

Ghodsi said: “By anchoring transactional data in Lakebase, delivering intuitive experiences through Databricks Apps, and enabling advanced multi-agent systems with Agent Bricks, we’re giving customers a unified foundation to build trusted, high-performance Data Intelligent Applications at scale.”

This fresh funding will also provide liquidity for employees, so they can cash out their shares, and is expected to support future AI acquisitions and research.

The round was led by Insight Partners, Fidelity Management & Research Company, and JP Morgan Asset Management with additional participation from Andreessen Horowitz, funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, funds managed by Blackstone, Coatue, GIC, MGX, NEA, Ontario Teachers Pension Plan, Robinhood Ventures, accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc., Temasek, Thrive Capital and Winslow Capital.

John Wolff, Managing Director at Insight Partners, said: “Databricks leads the way in turning AI innovation into enterprise impact. We’re thrilled to deepen our investment in a team that continues to pair strong financial performance with real customer results, setting the standard for how AI creates value for businesses. Databricks is just getting started.”

The scale of the investment reflects investor confidence that AI-driven products and agents will deliver sustained cost savings and new revenue opportunities for enterprises.

Bootnote

Databricks’ total VC funding is now at the $19 billion level. Snowflake had raised $1.4 billion when it went public in 2020.