Databricks has announced a $10 billion investment, marking one of the largest venture capital fundings ever in a deal that valued the data and AI platform at $62 billion.
"It's actually quite a logistical operation, raising $10 billion compared to previous rounds,” Ali Ghodsi, Databricks CEO and cofounder, told Fortune. “I probably underestimated the sheer number of investors and the amount of interest. So, it has put a huge amount of pressure on our finance team. We had been working 24/7 to just meet all of the demand. We had close to $18, $19 billion of interest in this round.”
Thrive Capital led the round. Co-lead investors in the Series J included Andreessen Horowitz, DST Global, Insight Partners, WCM, and GIC. New investors Iconiq Growth, Sands Capital, Wellington Management, and MGX were in the mix, while existing investor Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan also participated.
Databricks has completed $8.6 billion of the $10 billion to date.
Insight first invested in 2021, and doubled down again because the firm believes Databricks is about to hit “what we believe will be ‘escape velocity’ phase of growth,” Insight managing director John Wolff said via email. For its part, Thrive is a new investor.
“It became a bit of a joke at Thrive when we would discuss the deal, because so many of us had a founder-crush on Ali and the company because of their vision, execution, and gravitational market pull,” Thrive Capital partner Vince Hankes said via email.
In the quarter that ends on Jan. 31, 2025, Databricks says that it expects to be cash flow positive and cross $3 billion in revenue run-rate, a metric that projects a company’s future revenue.
“The revenue growth the company has achieved in the last year is almost unprecedented for a company at this stage,” said Thrive’s Hankes in an email. “We expect this product-led growth, driven by macro tailwinds in AI and the cloud, to keep going not just into 2025 but for the next decade-plus.”
Databricks was founded in 2013, and its key competitors include publicly-traded Snowflake. Databricks has more than 10,000 customers and provides a platform for data analytics, and AI.
The proceeds from this mega-round will be spent on competing for AI talent, Ghodsi said. He also affirmed that Databricks is considering acquisitions, particularly in the AI space, which would let it acquire talent and technical capabilities.
"It's a war for AI talent right now, especially with OpenAI, Anthropic,” Ghodsi said. “This is happening every day, and the talent market for AI is insane. I’ve never seen it like this,."
As for the persistent question of when Databricks will go public, here’s what he had to say:
"I think absolutely, theoretically, the earliest we’d go public would be sometime next year,” Ghodsi told Fortune. “But this [the latest funding] does give us flexibility to start providing liquidity opportunities for our employees, and that's important. A lot of them deserve that.”
Ghodsi is deeply aware of the bifurcating broader marketplace, in which AI-focused startups can raise money more easily, and get high valuations, while startups in other sectors struggle.
“It's a tale of two cities,” he said. “I think most companies are really struggling, having a really hard time. And then there’s this hot AI space, where everything is astronomical and crazy. It's two different planets with different laws of physics, and they have nothing to do with each other. Gravity's upside down in one and in the other one, it's the other way. That’s what it looks like.”
