The proceeds from the new investment round will help the firm speed up innovation and adoption of its data management architecture
Data and AI company Databricks takes its valuation to $38bn following a Series H round. (Credit: Gerd Altmann from Pixabay)
Databricks, a US-based data and artificial intelligence (AI) company, has raised $1.6bn in a Series H funding round to take its valuation to $38bn.
The funding round was led by Counterpoint Global (Morgan Stanley).
Databricks said that the funding will help it to expedite innovation and adoption of the data lakehouse, a new type of open data management architecture.
Other new investors, who took part in the round were Baillie Gifford, ClearBridge Investments and the University of California’s UC Investments.
Some of the company’s existing investors also participated in the financing round. These include Andreessen Horowitz, funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, Coatue Management, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, Fidelity Management & Research, GIC, Franklin Templeton, and others.
Counterpoint Global head Dennis Lynch said: “We’re incredibly excited to partner with the world-class team at Databricks whose lakehouse platform is reinventing analytics with the speed and scale customers require today.
“We believe the company is well-positioned to become a platform of choice among forward-thinking enterprises that want to transform valuable data into strategic business insights.”
Databricks said that as the world’s first lakehouse platform in the cloud, it has developed an open and unified architecture for data and AI.
The company’s customers build lakehouses on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure to support all the data and analytics workloads on a single platform. This helps them to get rid of architectural complexity, thereby reducing infrastructure costs significantly, while boosting data team productivity, and speeding up innovation.
To date, Databricks has secured a capital of $3.6bn. This includes $1bn raised by the company in a Series G round led by Franklin Templeton in February 2021 to take its valuation to $28bn at that time.
The firm plans to use the Series H proceeds in innovations that simplify AI further and in establishing the lakehouse as a new replacement to the legacy data warehouse.
Databricks co-founder and CEO Ali Ghodsi said: “This new investment is a reflection of the rapid adoption and incredible customer demand we’re seeing for the Databricks Lakehouse Platform and underscores the industry and investor confidence in our vision – that lakehouse is the data architecture of the future.
“This marks a thrilling new chapter that will allow us to accelerate our pace of innovation and further invest in the success of data-driven organisations on their journey to the lakehouse.”