Databricks Raises $1.6 Billion Series H Investment, Total at $3.6 Billion

Databricks, Inc. announced a $1.6 billion round of funding to accelerate innovation and adoption of the data lakehouse, as the data architecture’s popularity across data-driven organizations continues to grow at a rapid pace.

The series H funding, led by Counterpoint Global (Morgan Stanley), puts Databricks at a $38 billion post-money valuation.

Counterpoint Global is joined by other new investors including Baillie Gifford, ClearBridge Investments and UC Investments (Office of the Chief Investment Officer of the Regents of the University of California).

Existing investors participating in the round include Andreessen Horowitz, funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments), Coatue Management LLC, Fidelity Management & Research LLC, Franklin Templeton, GIC, Greenoaks Capital, Octahedron Capital Management L.P., funds and accounts managed by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc., Tiger Global Management LLC and Whale Rock Capital Management LLC.

As the first lakehouse platform in the cloud, Databricks has pioneered an open and unified architecture for data and AI, which brings the reliability, governance and performance of a data warehouse directly to the data lakes that most organizations already store all of their data in. Rather than being forced to move data out of the data lake, and between various disconnected and legacy systems for different use cases, customers are building lakehouses on AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud to support every data and analytics workload on a single platform. As a result, they’re able to avoid architectural complexity, reduce infrastructure costs, increase data team productivity, and innovate faster.

Hhundreds of leading organizations around the world are using the Databricks Lakehouse Platform.

“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,” said Andy Markus, chief data officer, AT&T.

This new round brings total funding to almost $3.6 billion, and will be used to accelerate the company in the massive and rapidly growing data lakehouse market.

Driven by open standards, cloud adoption and the continued rise of ML applications, the company intends to build on its lead by investing in innovations that further simplify AI, preserve choice and flexibility across all major public clouds, and establish the lakehouse as a modern replacement to the legacy data warehouse.

“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,” said Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and CEO. “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.“

“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,” said Dennis Lynch, head of Counterpoint Global.
 
“Databricks is an outstanding example of the innovation and pioneering spirit that flourishes throughout the University of California system and we are excited to support the next phase of a meteoric journey that first sparked at Berkeley,” said Jagdeep Singh Bachher, chief investment officer of the UC Regents for UC Investments. “This investment is a testament to the extraordinary opportunity we see for Databricks to shape the future of data and AI with the creation of the data lakehouse category. We look forward to partnering with the Databricks team to enable tens of thousands of future UC students to be the next gen of innovators.”

Other existing and new investors that participated in this funding round include: Alta Park Capital L.P., a suite of BNY Mellon funds, Discovery Capital, Dragoneer Investment Group, Flucas Ventures, Gaingels LLC, Geodesic Capital, Green Bay Ventures, The House Fund, Insight Partners, and New Enterprise Associates.