Databricks, the data and AI firm, reveals that it has completed a $1.6 billion round in order to promote the innovation and adoption of the data lakehouse, as the data architecture’s utilization across data-oriented organizations keeps growing rapidly.
The Series H investment round in Databricks was led by Counterpoint Global (Morgan Stanley). The massive fundraise puts Databricks at a $38 billion post-money valuation.
Counterpoint Global has reportedly been joined by other investors such as Baillie Gifford, ClearBridge Investments, and UC Investments (Office of the Chief Investment Officer of the Regents of the University of California).
Existing investors also took part in the round. They include Andreessen Horowitz, funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments), Coatue Management, Fidelity Management & Research, Franklin Templeton, GIC, Greenoaks, Octahedron Capital, funds and accounts managed by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc., Tiger Global Management and Whale Rock Capital Management.
As an additional commitment to support lakehouse adoption internationally, Databricks also confirmed the appointment of ex- Salesforce exec, Andy Kofoid, as President of Global Field Operations.
As the very first lakehouse platform offered via the Cloud, Databricks has pioneered an open and unified architecture for data and artificial intelligence, which aims to provide the reliability, governance and performance of a data warehouse to the data lakes that organizations are using store all of their data in.
Instead of being forced to transfer data out of the data lake, and between different disconnected and legacy systems for various use-cases, Databricks clients can develop lakehouses on AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud in order to support every data and analytics workload through a single, more unified platform.
As a result, they can avoid architectural complexity, considerably lower infrastructure expenses, boost data team productivity, and innovate a lot faster.
Currently, hundreds of major organizations across the globe are using the Databricks Lakehouse Platform.
Andy Markus, Chief Data Officer, AT&T, stated:
“AT&T has been changing the way people live, work and play for the past 144 years. As part of our goal to create new and exciting customer experiences that connect people with who and what they love, AT&T is modernizing our data ecosystem and migrating it to the cloud. This involves moving petabytes of data to the cloud. We leverage Data Lakehouse in Databricks for our most granular data as well as real-time data pipelines supporting key AI/ML applications.”
This latest investment round brings Databricks’ total overall funding to nearly $3.6 billion, and will be used to promote the firm’s lead in the massive and fast-evolving data lakehouse market. Based on open standards, Cloud adoption and the emergence of machine learning apps, the firm plans to develop and build on its lead by investing in innovations that can simplify AI, maintain/preserve choice and flexibility across various public Clouds, and establish the lakehouse as an effective replacement to the traditional data warehouse.
Additionally, under Kofoid’s leadership, the firm aims to invest to promote the adoption of the Databricks Lakehouse Platform internationally, by expanding into new markets, enabling and growing its partner ecosystem, and developing an extensive catalog of innovative solutions.
Ali Ghodsi, Co-Founder and CEO at Databricks, remarked:
“This new investment is a reflection of the rapid adoption and incredible customer demand we’re seeing for the Databricks Lakehouse Platform and underscores the industry and investor confidence in our vision – that lakehouse is the data architecture of the future. This marks a thrilling new chapter that will allow us to accelerate our pace of innovation and further invest in the success of data-driven organizations on their journey to the lakehouse.”
Dennis Lynch, Head of Counterpoint Global, added:
“We’re incredibly excited to partner with the world class team at Databricks whose lakehouse platform is reinventing analytics with the speed and scale customers require today. We believe the company is well positioned to become a platform of choice among forward thinking enterprises that want to transform valuable data into strategic business insights.”
Other existing and new Investors that took part in this round reportedly include: Alta Park Capital, a suite of BNY Mellon funds, Discovery Capital, Dragoneer Investment Group, Flucas Ventures, Gaingels, Geodesic, Green Bay Ventures, the House Fund, Insight Partners, and New Enterprise Associates.