Databricks: $1 Billion Series G Funding And $28 Billion Valuation

By Amit Chowdhry ● Feb 16, 2021
  • Data and AI company Databricks recently announced it has raised $1 billion in Series G funding led by new investor Franklin Templeton at a $28 billion valuation. These are the details.

Data and AI company Databricks recently announced it has raised $1 billion in Series G funding led by new investor Franklin Templeton. And it brought Databricks to a $28 billion post-money valuation.

Franklin Templeton was joined by other new investors including Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, Fidelity Management & Research LLC, and Whale Rock along with new strategic investors Amazon Web Services (AWS), CapitalG and Salesforce Ventures. And existing investors participating in the round include Microsoft, Andreessen Horowitz, Alkeon Capital Management, funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, Coatue Management, funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, and Tiger Global Management.

Other existing and new investors that participated in this funding round include Discovery Capital, Dragoneer Investment Group, Founders Circle Capital, Geodesic, GIC, Green Bay Ventures, Greenoaks Capital, New Enterprise Associates, and Octahedron Capital.

This funding will accelerate Databricks’ technology innovation and allow the company to scale and support the rapid adoption of the lakehouse — which is quickly becoming the data architecture of choice for data-driven organizations around the world.

KEY QUOTES:

“We see this investment and our continued rapid growth as further validation of our vision for a simple, open and unified data platform that can support all data-driven use cases, from BI to AI. Built on a modern lakehouse architecture in the cloud, Databricks helps organizations eliminate the cost and complexity that is inherent in legacy data architectures so that data teams can collaborate and innovate faster. This lakehouse paradigm is what’s fueling our growth, and it’s great to see how excited our investors are to be a part of it.”

— Ali Ghodsi, CEO and Co-Founder of Databricks

“Franklin Templeton is excited to work with Databricks as they enter this next stage of their impressive journey. We’ve seen first hand their ability to help enterprises leverage data to better understand customer journeys, operationalize business processes and, ultimately, build competitive advantage rooted in data. We believe they have a strong, accomplished team and visionary platform, and believe that the future for Databricks is bright, with a clear leadership position and open-ended growth opportunity.”

— Jonathan Curtis, Senior Vice President, Research Analyst and Portfolio Manager, Franklin Templeton.

“Azure Databricks continues to be an impressive solution that brings the latest advances in open, flexible and scalable data and AI capabilities to our customers. Our investment underscores the vision we share with Databricks of simplifying data and AI for our customers. Together, we will continue to build on the success of Azure Databricks and seamless integrations across Azure data services to enable cloud-scale analytics and AI on Azure.”

— Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President, Cloud + AI, Microsoft