Data analytics platform Databricks has confirmed that it has closed a previously announced $10 billion in Series J funding at a valuation of $62 billion.
The San Francisco-based company also added $5.25 billion in debt financing, funded by JPMorgan Chase, Barclays, Citi, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, among “other major financial institutions and alternative asset managers,” according to a press release. print.
Founded in 2013, companies use Databricks to aggregate and analyze large swaths of data from disparate systems to gather insights—for example, a retailer might want to combine data sets to understand that which products sell best, at what time of year, to predict inventory requirements.
Additionally, data is central to the growing AI revolution, with Databricks serving as a unified platform for combining and standardizing data—structured and unstructured—that is vital for building and deploying learning models. of machines.
The company has now raised about $19 billion in funding over its 12-year history, with its Series J round — first announced in December, when it raised $8.6 billion of its $10 billion target — bring in a host of visible new and existing investors. Indeed, in addition to entertaining the sovereign wealth of Temasek and Qatar, QIA, Facebook’s parent company Meta, also joined as a “strategic investor”.
It’s worth noting that corporate investment in AI-related companies has become something of a trend, with Meta and Amazon joining a $1 billion investment in data tagging startup Scale AI last year.
With its injection of new cash, Databricks said it plans to invest in new AI products, strengthen its global “go-to-market” operations and fund new acquisitions.
The $62 billion question now, however, is what’s going on with Databricks’ long-standing IPO plans?
In December, Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi said he would be “IPO-dumb” last year, both with the election and the new administration, as well as continued anxiety over the economy. He added that the “earliest theoretical possibility” for an IPO would be sometime in 2025.
However, the company also said it is putting a portion of its new cash reward toward providing liquidity to “current and former employees,” suggesting an IPO could happen sooner rather than later.
