Databricks is a company that offers a Unified Analytics Platform for data science teams, enabling them to collaborate with data engineering and lines of business for building data products. With Databricks, users can achieve faster time-to-value by creating analytic workflows that go from ETL to production. And Databricks makes it easier for users to focus on their data by providing a fully scalable and secure cloud infrastructure that reduces operational complexity and total cost of ownership.
Founded by the original creators of Apache Spark, Databricks announced it has raised $250 million in Series E funding led by Andreessen Horowitz at a $2.75 billion valuation. Coatue Management, Microsoft, New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Battery Ventures, Green Bay Ventures, and Geodesic also participated in this round. Including this round, Databricks has raised a total of $498.5 million.
And demand for Databricks’ Unified Analytics Platform is rapidly increasing as the company exceeded $100 million in annual recurring revenue last year. And the company is seeing approximately 3x year-over-year growth in subscription revenue as of the last quarter of 2018. Some of Databricks’ customers include Viacom, Shell, and HP.
“Databricks has gone from almost no revenue to over $100 million in annual recurring revenue in just three years, putting us among the fastest growing enterprise software companies,” said Databricks co-founder and CEO Ali Ghodsi. “What’s driving this incredible growth is the market’s massive appetite for Unified Analytics. Organizations need to achieve success with their AI initiatives and this requires a Unified Analytics Platform that bridges the divide between big data and machine learning.”
Unified Analytics also makes it easier for enterprises to build data pipelines across various siloed data storage systems and prepare labeled datasets for model building. And this enables organizations to do data science on massive data sets. Since Unified Analytics provides a common and collaborative platform for data science and engineering, it helps organizations accelerate innovation and achieve artificial intelligence success faster.
“Databricks is the clear winner in the big data platform race,” added Andreessen Horowitz co-founder and general partner. “In addition, they have created a new category atop their world-beating Apache Spark platform called Unified Analytics that is growing even faster. As a result, we are thrilled to invest in this round.”
There are more than 2,000 organizations around the world like Hotels.com, Overstock, Bechtel, Shell, and HP that are utilizing Databricks to unify data science and data engineering teams across the end-to-end and machine learning lifecycle.
Last year, Microsoft and Datarbricks announced the availability of Azure Databricks, which accelerated the adoption of Databricks’ Unified Analytics Platform. Azure customers can get Azure Databricks from Microsoft.
“Databricks has shown tremendous leadership in big data, data science and is uniquely positioned with Microsoft to meet the customer needs across big data, data warehousing and machine learning,” said Rohan Kumar, corporate vice president, Azure Data at Microsoft. “This investment builds on our successful multi-year partnership around Azure Databricks, a first-party Azure service that in conjunction with other Azure Data services like Azure Data Warehouse is greatly simplifying big data analytics and artificial intelligence solutions for many Microsoft customers.”
