Databricks: The phenomenal rise of a data and AI heavyweight
Thanks to the participation of companies including Nvidia and Capital One Ventures, data and AI giant Databricks has secured more than US$500 million in funding, giving it an overall value of US$43 billion.
Existing investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Franklin Templeton and Tiger Global are among the other venture capital heavyweights to take part in the Series I round, which was led by T. Rowe Price Associates.
It marks the latest significant milestone in the meteoric rise of Databricks, which was founded in 2013 and whose flagship product is the Lakehouse Platform.
Databricks has said it plans to partner with Nvidia – itself a beneficiary of the artificial intelligence boom – to build “transformative AI technology”.
“The commitment from long-term-focused strategic and financial partners reflects Databricks’ continued momentum, the rapid customer adoption of the Databricks Lakehouse, and the success customers are seeing from moving to a unified data and AI platform,” says Ali Ghodsi, Co-Founder and CEO of Databricks.
“Databricks and NVIDIA are building transformative AI technology, and we’re excited about the business value and innovation we can bring to our customers.”
Databricks capitalises on tech trends
Databricks was established a decade ago by the original creators of Apache Spark, Delta Lake and MLflow, and is on a mission to help data teams solve the world’s toughest problems.
Without a doubt, the company is best known for its Databricks Lakehouse Platform, which unifies data, analytics and AI on a single platform so that customers can govern, manage and derive insights from enterprise data and build their own generative AI solutions at a faster pace.
Today, more than 10,000 organisations worldwide – including Comcast, Condé Nast and more than half of the Fortune 500 – rely on the Databricks Lakehouse for exactly these reasons, not to mention massive-scale data engineering, collaborative data science, full-lifecycle machine learning and business analytics.
Databricks is headquartered in San Francisco and, thanks to its phenomenal growth, now has offices around the world.
The latest funding support comes hot on the heels of the firm announcing its second-quarter results for 2023, which included a revenue run rate of US$1.5bn, representing year-on-year revenue growth of more than 50% – the strongest quarterly incremental revenue growth in Databricks’ history.
Other highlights during the latest period saw the firm close its acquisition of MosaicML, a leading generative AI platform, and deliver 20 product and feature releases at the sold-out Data and AI Summit in June, which had more than 30,000 attendees from across the globe.
"Enterprise data is a goldmine for generative AI," adds Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia.
“Databricks is doing incredible work with Nvidia technology to accelerate data processing and GenAI models.”
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