Amazon, Alphabet, and Salesforce invest in a $28 billion big data startup Databricks; raises $1 billion in Series G funding

Databricks, a cloud-native tech startup whose software helps companies quickly process large sets of data and get it ready for analysis, announced today it has raised $1 billion to meet the growing demands of its unified data platform.

The new Series G funding round was led by new investor Franklin Templeton, with participation from new investors including Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, Fidelity Management & Research LLC, and Whale Rock, along with new strategic investors Amazon Web Services (AWS), CapitalG, and Salesforce Ventures, also participated.

Existing investors participating in the round include Microsoft, Andreessen Horowitz, Alkeon Capital Management, funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, Coatue Management, funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc. and Tiger Global Management.

The transaction, which values Databricks at $28 billion, shows the top three U.S. cloud providers recognize that the company represents an opportunity similar to Snowflake, another company with cloud software that helps companies manage data.

Founded in 2013 by Ali Ghodsi (CEO), Andy Konwinski, Ion Stoica, Matei Zaharia, Patrick Wendell, Reynold Xin, Scott Shenker, the Silicon Valley-based Databricks is a software platform that helps its customers unify their analytics across the business, data science, and data engineering. More than 5,000 organizations worldwide, including Comcast, Condé Nast, Nationwide, H&M, and over 40% of the Fortune 500, use Databricks’ unified data platform for data engineering, machine learning, and analytics.

Databricks rose to prominence after it helped companies implement a version of Apache Spark, an alternative to the Hadoop technology for storing lots of different kinds of data in massive quantities.

We see this investment and our continued rapid growth as further validation of our vision for a simple, open, and unified data platform that can support all data-driven use cases, from BI to AI,” said Ali Ghodsi, CEO and Co-Founder of Databricks. “Built on a modern lakehouse architecture in the cloud, Databricks helps organizations eliminate the cost and complexity that is inherent in legacy data architectures so that data teams can collaborate and innovate faster. This lakehouse paradigm is what’s fueling our growth, and it’s great to see how excited our investors are to be a part of it.”

This funding will accelerate Databricks’ innovation and allow the company to scale and support the rapid adoption of the lakehouse, which is quickly becoming the data architecture of choice for data-driven organizations around the world.

“Franklin Templeton is excited to work with Databricks as they enter this next stage of their impressive journey. We’ve seen first hand their ability to help enterprises leverage data to better understand customer journeys, operationalize business processes and, ultimately, build competitive advantage rooted in data. We believe they have a strong, accomplished team and visionary platform, and believe that the future for Databricks is bright, with a clear leadership position and open-ended growth opportunity,” said Jonathan Curtis, Senior Vice President, Research Analyst and Portfolio Manager, Franklin Templeton.

“Azure Databricks continues to be an impressive solution that brings the latest advances in open, flexible and scalable data and AI capabilities to our customers,” said Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President, Cloud + AI, Microsoft Corp. “Our investment underscores the vision we share with Databricks of simplifying data and AI for our customers. Together, we will continue to build on the success of Azure Databricks and seamless integrations across Azure data services to enable cloud-scale analytics and AI on Azure.”

Databricks’ software can help clean up data for exploration in data visualization software such as Salesforce-owned Tableau.