Databricks Raises $250M In Funding As Market Valuation Hits $2.75 Billion

Big data startup Databricks has raised a stunning $250 million in Series E funding, money the company will use to expand its engineering development team, grow its EMEA and APAC market presence, and increase support for customers in financial services, healthcare, retail, the public sector and other vertical industries.

The new financing, announced Tuesday, brings the San Francisco-based company's total funding to $498.5 million and raises its market valuation to $2.75 billion.

"Databricks has gone from almost no revenue to more than $100 million in annual recurring revenue in just three years, putting us among the fastest growing enterprise software companies," said Ali Ghodsi, CEO and co-founder of Databricks, in a statement.

Databricks develops and markets its Unified Analytics Platform, which businesses and organizations use to build connections across multiple, siloed data storage systems, creating data sets used by data scientists to build data models used for machine learning and business analysis applications.

The Unified Analytics Platform is based on Apache Spark, the open-source, distributed cluster-computing framework that underpins many big data systems. Apache Spark was developed by Databricks' founders, including Chief Technologist Matei Zaharia.

Annual recurring revenue exceeded $100 million in 2018 and subscription revenue in the last quarter of the year increased three-fold year over year, Databricks said.

"What's driving this incredible growth is the market's massive appetite for unified analytics," Ghodsi said. "Organizations need to achieve success with their AI initiatives and this requires a Unified Analytics Platform that bridges the divide between big data and machine learning."

Databricks' customers include Nielsen, Hotels.com, Overstock, Bechtel, Shell and HP.

The company, founded in 2013, attributed part of its 2018 growth to Azure Databricks, an integrated Microsoft Azure-Databricks cloud service developed in collaboration with Microsoft. The partnership has been so successful that Microsoft was one of the investors in the new round of funding.

"Databricks has shown tremendous leadership in big data [and] data science and is uniquely positioned with Microsoft to meet the customer needs across big data, data warehousing and machine learning," said Rohan Kumar, corporate vice president, Azure Data at Microsoft, in the statement.

The funding round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, joined by Coatue Management, New Enterprise Associates and Microsoft.

Databricks works with a number of systems integration and service partners including Capgemini, Cognizant, Clarity Insights and Slalom.