Ali Ghodsi, Co-Founder and CEO of Databricks Inc., speaks during a televised interview with Bloomberg Technology in San Francisco, California, USA, on Tuesday, October 22, 2019.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Databricks, a start-up whose software helps companies quickly process large amounts of data and prepare it for analysis, said Monday it has raised $ 1 billion in fresh money, including from a few prominent corporate investors. Amazon Web Services, Alphabet’s CapitalG venture arm and Salesforce Ventures all participated, according to a statement. Microsoft, which previously invested in Databricks, is also participating in the new round, according to a statement.
The transaction, which values Databricks at $ 28 billion, shows that the three largest US cloud providers recognize that the company offers an opportunity similar to Snowflake, another cloud software company that helps businesses manage data.
Databricks gained notoriety for helping companies implement a version of Apache Spark, an alternative to Hadoop technology for storing many different types of data in massive amounts. It can help clean up data for exploration in data visualization software such as Tableau, owned by Salesforce. The Databricks software provides an easy way for companies to run this type of software without having to worry about configuring and updating it. Databricks is also increasingly helping organizations implement artificial intelligence models.
“We’re 100 percent cloud-native,” Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi told CNBC in a 2019 interview. The same principle applies to Snowflake, in which Salesforce had also invested and showed strong revenue growth since its IPO last year.
Amazon, the largest cloud provider, didn’t put any money into Snowflake before it went public. Now it is investing in Databricks at a later stage than it has in the past.
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