Data and artificial intelligence company Databricks announced the completion of its first round of financing led by T. Rowe Price Associates. This round of financing raised a total of more than US$500 million, valuing the company at US$43 billion, with a price per share of US$73.50.
This round of financing was led by funds and accounts managed by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc.; other investors include existing Morgan Stanley, Franklin Templeton, etc., as well as newly added Capital One Ventures, Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan and NVIDIA. Among them, Capitol One is a top customer of Snowflake, Databricks' main competitor.
At the same time, Databricks also revealed in the announcement that its annual revenue run rate has now exceeded $1.5 billion. The company's second-quarter sales increased 50% year-on-year, achieving the strongest quarterly incremental revenue growth in history; non-GAAP subscription gross profit margin hit a record high of 85%. Currently, its number of global customers exceeds 10,000.
Headquartered in San Francisco, Databricks is one of the fastest growing companies in the Silicon Valley/Bay Area region and one of the fastest growing companies in the history of the IT industry. Its financing history includes: completing a US$1 billion Series G financing in February 2021, bringing the valuation to US$28 billion. A larger US$1.6 billion Series H round of financing led by Morgan Stanley was conducted in August 2021, with a valuation reaching US$38 billion.
Before announcing the completion of this round of financing, Databricks also spent $1.3 billion to acquire generative AI startup MosaicML.
Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and CEO of Databricks, told VentureBeat that the new round of funding "is really about the strategic nature of the partners and investors that we're bringing on board in this round." The partnership with Nvidia is specifically designed to better integrate with the company and accelerate time to value.
"This is something I've worked directly with Jensen (Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang) and really deepened our relationship, from the GPUs that underpin all these AI applications, all the way to the software that runs on them."
In addition, Databricks has been training its own large language models based on open science for enterprises, most notably Dolly released in March and Dolly 2.0 released in April. Ghodsi believes that the time is ripe for the explosion of B2B generative AI applications. "I think you're going to see a lot of these applications in the second half of this year."