The Series H round valued the company at a massive $38 billion.

Data and AI company Databricks announced Tuesday (August 31, 2021) its Series H raise of $1.6 billion in a round led by led by new investor Counterpoint Global (Morgan Stanley). Databricks previously raised $1 billion in February at a valuation of $28 billion. (Databricks)

The company specializes in software that helps companies handle vast amounts of data (“datalakes,” or low cost low-cost storage systems that can manage any type of data, structured or unstructured) for AI and business Intelligence applications.

Lakehouse architecture

“Databricks customers are building lakehouses on AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud to support every data and analytics workload on a single platform,” the company said in a statement. “As a result, they’re able to avoid architectural complexity, significantly reduce infrastructure costs, increase data team productivity, and innovate faster.”

Databricks will use the funding to accelerate the development and adoption of the data lakehouse architecture in its cloud-based data lakehouse platform, said to be the first of its kind in the world.

Revenue

Revenues at Databricks are growing rapidly at 75% year on year, and its current annual recurring revenue is $600 million.

The firm is on track to clock over $1 billion of revenue in 2022.

It has over 5,000 enterprise customers globally, including 40% of the Fortune 500.

Funding insights

Other new investors joining the round included 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, 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.

The H round brings the startup’s cumulative funding to about $3.6 billion.

Dennis Lynch, Head of Counterpoint Global, said the company’s 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,” he added.

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