AI company Databricks completes $10 billion J round of financing with a valuation of $62 billion, led by Thrive Capital

Big data and artificial intelligence company Databricks announced that it has completed a $10 billion Series J financing at a valuation of $62 billion, led by Thrive Capital, and participated by Andreessen Horowitz, DST Global, GIC Pte Ltd., Insight Partners, WCM Investment Management, etc. According to people familiar with the matter, Lightspeed Venture Partners also invested $200 million. The company "intends to invest the funds in new artificial intelligence products, acquisitions, and significantly expand its international market business", and will also be used to purchase current and former employee shares, in addition to paying taxes related to employees selling shares. In the fiscal year ending January 2025, Databricks expects annual revenue to exceed $3 billion. Sales grew by more than 60% in the most recent quarter ending in October. CEO Ali Ghodsi said in an interview that maintaining this growth rate means expanding Databricks' market operations and engineering talent. As for potential acquisitions, Ghodsi said he is looking at startups focused on artificial intelligence to find technology and talent. Databricks develops software that can acquire, analyze and build artificial intelligence applications from a variety of sources, all of which are complex data from the company. The company's main competitors are generally considered to be Snowflake Inc. and services provided by cloud infrastructure vendors such as Microsoft Fabric. Databricks SQL, the product that competes most directly with Snowflake, has a revenue run rate of $600 million and is growing at an annual rate of more than 150%. The company said that more than 500 customers will spend more than $1 million per year on the Databricks platform. "The earliest we can go public in theory is next year. But the new financing gives us some flexibility to provide liquidity opportunities for employees," said Ghodsi. (Bloomberg)