Databricks raises over $500 mln at $43 bln valuation
14/09/2023 14:00
By Niket Nishant and Krystal Hu
Sept 14 (Reuters) - Databricks, a data analytics
platform using artificial intelligence (AI), said on Thursday it
secured more than $500 million in a funding round that valued
the company at $43 billion, marking one of the biggest funding
events for private tech companies this year amid AI-fueled
optimism.
The new round, led by T. Rowe Price, could mark the last
round of private funding as the data company gears up for the
public market. Chipmaker Nvidia NVDA.O , another beneficiary of
the AI boom, and credit card firm Capital One Financial COF.N ,
also participated in the latest funding round.
The company plans to use the funds to build out foundation
models in partnership with Nvidia, which makes the core
computing chips that run AI models, Ali Ghodsi, chief executive
of Databricks, told Reuters in an interview.
"You want to have models that are really good at
specific tasks. It matters to us to be able to do this for our
enterprise clients," Ghodsi said.
Other marquee names in the venture capital industry like
Andreessen Horowitz, Baillie Gifford, Morgan Stanley's
Counterpoint Global, Fidelity Management & Research and Tiger
Global also participated in the round.
AI, the latest buzzword in the technology space, has
captivated the interest of investors from Silicon Valley to Wall
Street.
Following the massive popularity of OpenAI's chatbot
ChatGPT, many players in the industry including Anthropic,
Hugging Face and Modular have raised funds in recent months.
The financing for Databricks comes as the company sharpened
focus on developing a chatbot that can analyze business data
like sales transactions or written reports.
In June, it rolled out an AI assistant called LakehouseIQ,
which can interpret queries submitted in natural language
instead of computer codes. Weeks later, it also closed the
acquisition of MosaicML, a generative AI startup it bought in a
$1.3 billion deal.
Databricks said it posted a 50% year-over-year jump in
revenue in the second quarter ended July, and had more than
10,000 customers globally.
Its latest valuation is over 13% more than the $38 billion
the San Francisco-based company was worth after its last
fundraise in 2021. The company has raised $4 billion since
inception.
(Reporting by Niket Nishant in Bengaluru and Krystal Hu in Hong
Kong; Editing by Dhanya Ann Thoppil)
((Niket.Nishant@thomsonreuters.com;))