Databricks data analytics platform becomes increasingly valuable

Databricks data analytics platform becomes increasingly valuable

San Francisco, 9/18/2021

AI data analytics platform Databricks is now the fourth largest venture-backed and privately held company in the U.S. following its massive $1.6 billion funding round. Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet have all increased their investments in the cloud software company, which is known for its data „lakehouse“ model.

Databricks sells software that allows companies to analyze their data at various cloud providers. The company is now valued at $38 billion, up 35% since February. Annual recurring revenue of $600 million is up 75% in the last year. The company is on track to reach at least $1 billion in revenue in 2022.

Databricks last raised $1 billion in February under the leadership of Franklin Templeton. The company’s founders developed the open-source Apache Spark, Delta Lake and MLflow projects. Databricks‘ main cloud service, Lakehouse, uses all three to bring together disparate data sources and run workloads from one platform.

Companies like Databricks are tackling big data, which can help organizations more easily prepare their machine learning projects. Scalable cloud services allow companies to collect large amounts of data without having to invest upfront in IT infrastructure and teams.

Databricks‘ competitors include Snowflake ($97 billion), which completed its largest software IPO ever last September, and C3.ai, which raised $651 million in its December IPO.

Investors believe Databricks‘ success lies in its „land grab“ in the Big Data storage and open source software market.