Who talked about an AI bubble? Databricks announces raising more than $4 billion in a Series L round, valuing the company at $134 billion.
The funding round was led by Insight Partners, Fidelity Management & Research Company, and J.P. Morgan Asset Management. The participation of major asset managers such as BlackRock and Blackstone signals growing institutional interest in investments in the AI sector.
A portion of the funds will be set aside to enable employees to pursue secondary stock sales. Ali Ghodsi also told the Wall Street Journal that the company plans to create thousands of new roles, including AI researchers, to build an AI lab that currently employs only about a hundred people.
Sustained growth
The investment will also support future acquisitions in the AI space and deepen the research push.
With this latest fundraising round, Databricks now far surpasses the valuation ($75 billion) of its publicly traded rival Snowflake.
Databricks, founded in 2013 in San Francisco, is posting impressive financials with an annualized revenue run rate of $4.8 billion in the third quarter, up more than 55% year over year. In September of last year, that rate stood at $4 billion.
The company counts more than 700 customers among a base of over 20,000, generating annual revenue above $1 million. This fundraising comes just a few months after it raised $1 billion for a $100 billion valuation.
Three strategic axes for intelligent applications
The new capital will be used to accelerate the development of three strategic offerings:
> Lakebase, presented as the first serverless Postgres database designed specifically for the AI era. Launched six months ago, this product already counts thousands of customers and is recording revenue growth twice as fast as Databricks’ data warehousing product.
> Databricks Apps, which enables the rapid and secure creation and deployment of data and AI applications.
> Agent Bricks, which helps organizations build and scale high-quality agents on their data with ease.
