Databricks: $400 Million Funding And $6.2 Billion Valuation

By Amit Chowdhry • Oct 23, 2019
  • Unified data analytics leader Databricks announced it has raised $400 million in funding at a $6.2 billion valuation

Databricks — a leader in unified data analytics — announced it has raised $400 million in funding to continue powering its growth and rapid customer adoption. Databricks is known for helping data teams solve tough problems. And as the leader in Unified Data Analytics, Databricks helps organizations make all their data ready for analytics and empower data-driven decisions across the organization. Plus it rapidly adopts machine learning to outpace the competition.

The Series F round of funding led by Andreessen Horowitz’s Late Stage Venture Fund is going to accelerate innovation and scale the company across the globe. The funding round values the company at $6.2 billion.

Andreessen Horowitz was joined by major new investors including funds and accounts managed by BlackRock and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates and Tiger Global Management. Alkeon Capital Management, Coatue Management, Dragoneer Investment Group, Geodesic, Green Bay Ventures, Microsoft, New Enterprise Associates (NEA), and Tiger Global Management also joined the round.

Databricks has grown its annual recurring revenue (ARR) well over 2.5 times over the past year and went from almost no revenue to a $200 million revenue run rate in less than four years. Databricks has a global customer base with thousands of organizations, including Comcast, Shell, Expedia, and Regeneron.

“Data teams at thousands of organizations globally are now leveraging our Unified Data Analytics Platform to solve their toughest problems,” said Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and CEO at Databricks. “Our bets on massive data processing, machine learning, open-source and the shift to the cloud are all playing out in the market and resulting in enormous and rapidly growing global customer demand. As a result, Databricks is among the fastest-growing enterprise software cloud companies on record.”

With the funding, Databricks is going to invest 100 million Euros in its recently announced European Development Center in Amsterdam over the next three years. This engineering hub has already grown 3 times over the past two years. And the company is going to build dedicated engineering teams to advance the popular open source technologies it invented recently for data management and machine learning, including Delta Lake, MLflow, and Koalas.

“Databricks’ net revenue retention is astounding,” added David George, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. “Why? Because customers love the product. Beyond that, they’ve followed up their breakthrough Spark technology with an amazing series of open source innovations including Delta Lake, MLflow, and Koalas.”