Close-up of Databricks company logo on building facade, Rincon Hill, San Francisco, June 7, 2024.
Smith Collection/ gado | Archive Photos | Getty Images
Databricks, one of the most valuable privately held companies, announced a $10 billion financing on Tuesday that values the software maker at $62 billion.
With the money, Databricks will be able to provide liquidity to current and former employees, make acquisitions, and expand overseas, according to a statement. The company’s new valuation is up from $43 billion in 2023. Rival Snowflake was worth about $57 billion at Monday’s close.
Databricks sells software for analyzing and cleaning up data, and it also runs artificial intelligence models for clients. The software is available on the Amazon, Google and Microsoft clouds, which are also competitors.
The company expects to generate positive free cash flow for the first time with a $3 billion revenue run rate in the quarter that ends on Jan. 31, Databricks said. The company’s revenue in the October quarter grew more than 60% year over year.
Investors in the financing, of which it has raised $8.6 billion to date, include Thrive Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, DST Global, GIC, Iconiq Growth, Insight Partners, MGX, Sands Capital, WCM Investment Management and Wellington Management.
Technology investors have been anticipating a Databricks initial public offering for years. They may only have to wait a few more months.
ServiceTitan, a company with software for plumbers and others working in the trades, raised about $625 million in an initial public offering last week, and some investors have predicted that tech IPOs will become more frequent again in 2025 after a relative drought since late 2021.
Databricks did not offer new information about its expectations for an IPO on Tuesday.
“If we were going to go, the earliest would be, let’s say mid next year or something like that,” Ali Ghodsi, Databricks’ co-founder and CEO, said at the Cerebral Valley AI Summit in November.
Late-stage investors with large funds don’t have many options for what to back, Ghodsi said.
“There’s nowhere to put it, really, except maybe Databricks, Stripe or, you know, maybe OpenAI,” Ghodsi said.
Databricks will use a portion of the new money to attract job candidates, given that AI companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI are also hiring rapidly, Ghodsi told CNBC in an interview on Tuesday.
“We want to be super-competitive, and we want to pay up for that talent,” he said.
Databricks made its fourth appearance on CNBC’s Disruptor 50 list of private companies in 2024.
