Databricks has raised more than $4 billion in a Series L financing round. This brings its valuation to $134 billion, an increase of 34 percent compared to three months ago. It is the third major capital injection in less than a year.
The company is growing rapidly thanks to the AI revolution. The combination of in-depth data insights and AI is an obvious one; Databricks is fully committed to it and is even thinking beyond AI alone. Revenue is now $4.8 billion on an annual basis, an increase of 55 percent. More than $1 billion of that comes from AI products. This explosive growth explains why investors are lining up.
CEO Ali Ghodsi says investors were contacting him daily. “It wasn’t like two months ago, but constant,” he told The Wall Street Journal. The financing round was led by Insight Partners, Fidelity, and J.P. Morgan Asset Management. Andreessen Horowitz, BlackRock, and Thrive Capital also participated, TechCrunch reports.
AI agents as spearhead
The company is investing heavily in Lakebase, a database for AI agents based on open source Postgres, due to the rise of AI. That foundation came about through the acquisition of startup Neon for $1 billion.
In addition, Databricks developed Agent Bricks, a platform that allows companies to build AI agents that have access to their own data. The company also signed deals worth hundreds of millions with AI labs Anthropic and OpenAI to offer their models within enterprise products. “Companies are rediscovering how to build intelligent applications,” Ghodsi said in a statement. “The combination of generative AI with new programming paradigms opens doors to completely new workloads.”
But the competition isn’t sleeping. Snowflake, Google BigQuery, and Teradata are fighting for the same customers. Databricks sets itself apart by uniting data engineering, analytics, and AI/ML on a single platform.
Global expansion
Part of the new money will go toward expansion. According to The Wall Street Journal, Databricks wants to create thousands of jobs in Asia, Europe, and Latin America. There will also be more budget for AI researchers. The workforce will grow to nearly 12,000 employees this year.
Series L rounds are rare, TechCrunch notes, but Databricks continues to attract successful venture capital. Last year, the company achieved a valuation of $60 billion. That jump to $100 billion and now $134 billion shows how much confidence there is in the company. An IPO does not seem necessary for the time being if you can raise billions without public scrutiny.