According to Cointelegraph, cloud data company Databricks has completed a Series I fundraising round, raising $500 million from primary investor accounts led by T.Rowe and new investors Capital One Ventures, Ghisallo Capital Management, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, and Nvidia. The latest investment round values the company at $43 billion with a share price of $73.50. In 2021, Databricks raised $1.6 billion in a Series H funding round at a valuation of $38 billion.
The financial partnership with Nvidia indicates increased synergy between the two artificial intelligence (AI) corporations, with generative AI for enterprise data being the primary driver for the fundraise. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang praised Databricks' work with Nvidia technology to accelerate data processing and generative AI models.
Databricks' most prominent product is its Lakehouse platform, which combines a data warehouse with a data lake for seamless developer workflow access. The platform unifies data, analytics, and AI on a single platform, enabling customers to govern, manage, and derive insights from enterprise data and build their own generative AI solutions faster. Lakehouse allows enterprise clients to build their own generative AI models, such as a ChatGPT-style AI system trained only on a client's internal data, putting privacy controls in the hands of the business client and allowing enterprises to fine-tune models to prevent unwanted or erroneous outputs.
With a valuation of $43 billion, Databricks is one of the highest valued U.S. artificial intelligence companies, excluding trillion-dollar competitors such as AWS, Microsoft Cloud, and Google Cloud. Its chief competitor, Snowflake, has a market value of approximately $51 billion. Notably, Capital One, one of the firms investing in the latest Databricks funding round, is among Snowflake's largest corporate clients.
