Databricks cloud-based lakehouse business is growing so fast that a fresh funding round at a $100 billion-plus valuation is being closed, and the CEO dreams of it becoming a trillion dollar business.
A company statement talked of strong momentum for the AI-infused lakehouse supplier. It has more than 15,000 global customers using its Data Intelligence Platform to build AI models and agents so as to analyze their data better and faster. The amount of raised capital has not been disclosed.
Co-founder and CEO Ali Ghodsi stated: “Databricks is benefiting from an unprecedented global demand for AI apps and agents, turning companies’ data into goldmines. We’re thrilled this round is already over-subscribed and to partner with strategic, long-term investors who share our vision for the future of AI.”
He prefaced this by saying: “We’re seeing tremendous investor interest because of the momentum behind our AI products, which power the world’s largest businesses and AI services. Every company can securely turn its enterprise data into AI apps and agents to grow revenue faster, operate more efficiently, and make smarter decisions with less risk.”
It says it will use the new capital to accelerate its AI strategy by expanding Agent Bricks, investing in Lakebase, its new database offering, and funding global growth. It recently added a Lakebase Postgres database layer to its lakehouse, so that AI apps and agents can run analytics on operational data there. Agent Bricks is a toolset to automate AI agent development.
Earlier this year, in March, it partnered with Anthropic, and its Claude LLM, and Palantir for LLM tuning.
Twelve year-old Databricks’ most recent funding round was a J-round at the end of 2024 raising $10 billion and taking total funding past $14 billion. Its valuation at that time was $62 billion. Since then, it added another $5 billion in debt financing and its valuation has risen 60 percent.
The annual run rate for its SQL data warehousing product was $600 million at the end of 2024, more than 150 percent higher than a year ago. It had recruited 10,000+ customers, including Block, Comcast, Condé Nast, Rivian, Shell, including more than 60 percent of the Fortune 500. Now it has up to 5,000 additional customers and we understand its annual recurring revenue was $3.7 billion in July.
Rival Snowflake has a market capitalization of $66.14 billion. Databricks investors will be hoping for an IPO payday well past that.
