Databricks, the data and AI company, has raised $1.6 billion in a fresh round of funding to accelerate innovation and adoption of the data lakehouse, as the data architecture’s popularity across data-driven organisations continues to grow at a rapid pace.
This latest funding, led by Counterpoint Global (Morgan Stanley), puts Databricks at a $38 billion post-money valuation.
California-based Databricks has pioneered an open and unified architecture for data and AI, which brings the reliability, governance and performance of a data warehouse directly to the data lakes that most organisations already store all of their data in.
Rather than being forced to move data out of the data lake, and between various disconnected and legacy systems for different use cases, Databricks customers are building lakehouses on AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud to support every data and analytics workload on a single platform. As a result, they’re able to avoid architectural complexity, significantly reduce infrastructure costs, increase data team productivity, and innovate faster.
The new round brings Databricks’ total funding to almost $3.6 billion, and will be used to build up their position in the rapidly growing data lakehouse market.
Driven by open standards, cloud adoption and the continued rise of machine learning applications, the company intends to invest in innovations that further simplify AI, preserve choice and flexibility across all major public clouds, and establish the lakehouse as a modern replacement to the legacy data warehouse.
In addition, the company will invest to accelerate adoption of the Databricks Lakehouse Platform globally, by entering new markets, enabling and growing its partner ecosystem, and building a broad catalog of industry solutions.
New investors include Baillie Gifford, ClearBridge Investments and UC Investments. Topping up their investments were Andreessen Horowitz, funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments), Coatue Management, Fidelity Management & Research, Franklin Templeton, GIC, Greenoaks, Octahedron Capital, funds and accounts managed by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc., Tiger Global Management and Whale Rock Capital Management.
Other existing and new investors that participated in this funding round include: Alta Park Capital, a suite of BNY Mellon funds, Discovery Capital, Dragoneer Investment Group, Flucas Ventures, Gaingels, Geodesic, Green Bay Ventures, the House Fund, Insight Partners, and New Enterprise Associates.
