Historically, there have not been many rounds that could make us gasp at their size. Last year, it wasn’t OpenAI’s $6.6 billion funding at a $157 billion post-money valuation that stole the spotlight. Instead, it was the US-based data analytics software company Databricks, co-founded by Romanian CTO Matei Zaharia, announcing its $10 billion Series J funding round.
2025 begins with momentum for the company. Databricks has reportedly raised another $5 billion in financing — the largest debt raise ever, according to a January 13 Bloomberg report. The funds were secured from lenders including Blackstone, Apollo Global Management, and Blue Owl Capital, as reported by the media.
The fundraiser was organized by JPMorgan Chase last year. Bloomberg noted that several banks, including JPMorgan, Barclays, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs Group, Morgan Stanley and BNP Paribas, provided a $2.5 billion revolving credit facility as part of the debt financing.
The software firm plans to use the funds to manage tax obligations linked to employee stock sales, as stated in the report.
$10B series J funding, valuation reaches $62B
The Databricks Data Intelligence Platform allows organizations to effectively apply their data for analytics, machine learning, and AI applications.
In December, Databricks announced its $10 billion Series J funding round, which followed an increase from the initially expected $8 billion in mid-November, as reported by Reuters.
The AI and software company started to allocate the capital toward developing new AI products, acquisitions and international go-to-market operations, provide liquidity for current and former employees and to pay related taxes.
The round is “substantially oversubscribed,” Databricks Co-Founder and CEO Ali Ghodsi said in the December release.
The Databricks funding round was led by Thrive Capital, with co-leads Andreessen Horowitz, DST Global, GIC, Insight Partners, and WCM Investment Management.
“We worked to make sure that we could be a co-lead, despite being already an investor on the cap table,” George Mathew, managing director at Insight Partners previously explained for TechCrunch.
Key participants include existing investor Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan and new investors like ICONIQ Growth, MGX, Sands Capital, and Wellington Management.
In December the company hit a $62 billion valuation.
$3B in Revenue
Founded in 2013, the San Francisco-based company was established by Romanian engineers and entrepreneurs Ion Stoica, serving as Executive Chairman, and Matei Zaharia, CTO with Romanian origin, along with Ali Ghodsi, CEO, and Reynold Xin.
The company’s origins trace back to Apache Spark, a software solution for managing large-scale data developed by Zaharia and Ghodsi. Zaharia is also an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, while Stoica is a professor and head of the RISELab IT lab at the University of California, Berkeley.
Sacra estimates that Databricks crossed $3B in annual recurring revenue (ARR) at the end of 2024, up 60% year-over-year from $1.9B at the end of 2023.
As of June 2024, Databricks was reporting 80% gross margins, down from 85% a year ago, with net dollar retention at 140%.
“These are still the early days of AI,” Ghodsi said. “We are positioning the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform to deliver long-term value for our customers, and our team is committed to helping companies across every industry build data intelligence.”
