Databricks Hires Splunk CFO Dave Conte After Raising $400M

The fast-growing big data startup announces a new $400 million Series F funding round as well as the hiring of new Chief Financial Officer Dave Conte.

Fast-growing data software startup Databricks is making huge headwinds with the unveiling on Tuesday of a new $400 million funding round and the hiring of Splunk’s former chief financial officer, Dave Conte.

Conte was Splunk’s CFO for the last eight years where he helped take the company public and grow it from $100 million in annual revenue to more than $2 billion. Effective immediately, Conte is now Databricks’ CFO responsible for leading all of the financial and operational functions of the startup.

“[Conte’s] experience leading and scaling global financial and operational functions at high-growth enterprise software companies is impressive,” said Databricks CEO and co-founder Ali Ghodsi in a statement. “Dave brings a breadth of knowledge and proven track record to support our continued growth.”

[Related: Microsoft Azure Founder Deepak Patil To Lead Dell’s Cloud Business]

Databricks revealed Conte’s hiring while at the same announcing that it had raised $400 million in a Series F funding round.

The new $400 million in funding is aimed to accelerate innovation and scale across the globe as Databricks is growing annual recurring revenue at rate of over 250 percent year over year, the compay said.

“Data teams at thousands of organizations globally are now leveraging our Unified Data Analytics Platform to solve their toughest problems,” said Ghodsi. “Our bets on massive data processing, machine learning, open source and the shift to the cloud are all playing out in the market and resulting in enormous and rapidly growing global customer demand. As a result, Databricks is among the fastest growing enterprise software cloud companies on record.”

The San Francisco-based startup, named in CRN’s 2019 Coolest Big Data Management And Integration Software vendor list, has gone from almost no revenue to a $200 million run rate in less than four years, bringing the company’s valuation to $6.2 billion.

Databricks, founded by the creators of the Apache Spark analytics engine for big data, develops the Databricks Unified Analytics Platform that combines data science and data engineering to handle all data analysis processes.

The new $400 million will go toward building dedicated engineering teams to advance its popular open source technologies for data management and machine learning such as Delta Lake, ML flow and Koalas.

Approximately $111 million of the funding will be invested in Databrick’s recently announced European Development Center engineering hub in Amsterdam. The remaining portion of funding will be put towards fueling global growth in regions outside of North America.

The Series F funding round was led by Andreessen Horowitz's Late Stage Venture Fund, as well as Alkeon Capital Management, BlackRock Inc., Coatue Management, Dragoneer Investment Group, Geodesic, Green Bay Ventures, Microsoft Corporation, New Enterprise Associates, funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc., and Tiger Global Management.

In February, Databricks also raised $250 million in a Series E funding round. The company helps organizations make all their data ready for analytics, empower data-driven decisions and adopt machine learning capabilities.