Databricks Closes $15.3B Funding at $62B Valuation, Meta Joins as ‘Strategic Investor’

Data analytics platform Databricks has confirmed that it has closed a previously announced $10 billion Series J equity financing, at a valuation of $62 billion.

The San Francisco-based company also added another $5.25 billion in debt financing, funded by JPMorgan Chase, Barclays, Citi, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, among other “leading financial institutions and alternative asset managers ”, according to a press release. The company has now raised approximately $19 billion in funding in its 12 years of existence (including $14 billion in equity).

Databricks have long been used for large data science projects. For example, businesses use the platform to aggregate and analyze vast amounts of data from disparate systems to gain insights. For example, a retailer may want to combine data sets to determine which products sell best, at what times of year, in order to forecast inventory needs. .

More recently, Databricks has become a major cog in AI projects. Data is essential to the burgeoning AI revolution, and Databricks serves as a unified platform for combining and standardizing data – structured and unstructured – essential to building and deploying machine learning models.

This latest Series J round – first announced in December, when Databricks raised $8.6 billion – ushers in a slew of notable new and existing investors. Besides Temasek and QIA (Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund), Facebook’s parent company Meta also supports Databricks as a “strategic investor”.

It is unclear whether Databricks is a client of Meta and/or vice versa. We are asking companies and will update this article as we learn more.

It’s worth noting that corporate investments in AI-aligned businesses have become a trend, with Meta and Amazon joining a billion-dollar investment in data labeling startup Scale AI last year.

With this new cash injection, Databricks announced plans to invest in new AI products, strengthen its global “go-to-market” operations, and fund new acquisitions.

But the big $62 billion question now is: What’s going on with Databricks’ long-standing IPO plans?

Last December, Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi said it would be “stupid to do an IPO” last year, given the election and new administration, as well as ongoing anxiety regarding the economy. He added that the “first theoretical possibility” of an IPO would take place in 2025.

However, the company also said it was dedicating some of its new cash to providing liquidity to “current and former employees,” suggesting an IPO could happen later rather than sooner.