Databricks is within the technique of closing a recent spherical at a $100 billion valuation, sources confirmed to TechCrunch. The spherical was initially reported by the Wall Road Journal.
A supply aware of the deal tells TechCrunch solely that the brand new spherical is about $1 billion and was wildly oversubscribed. Databricks, finest recognized for its knowledge analytics merchandise, avoided promoting much more fairness as a result of it didn’t want money for operations after its as soon as record-breaking $10 billion increase at a $62 billion valuation in January, in keeping with the supply. (OpenAI has since squashed the document with a $40 billion increase in March.)
The spherical was co-led by each Thrive and one among Databricks’ early traders, Perception Companions, TechCrunch has discovered. These two companies led the final spherical as nicely. The corporate has now raised about $20 billion because it was based in 2013.
This was a main spherical, which means it didn’t embody workers promoting their shares. Nevertheless, sources near the corporate say Databricks has already had two secondary rounds for workers in 2025. These presents allowed workers to promote as much as 40%, 50%, or 60% of their shares, relying on the dimensions of their holdings.
In each instances, the supply mentioned, the total funds obtainable for the secondary spherical weren’t maxed out, which means workers held on to extra shares than they may have bought. Whereas Databricks clearly isn’t in a rush to IPO, workers have had two latest probabilities to money out shares.
This new spherical, nonetheless, was raised to pursue two particular initiatives — a database for AI brokers and its AI agent platform — Databricks co-founder and CEO Ali Ghodsi informed TechCrunch in an interview.
The corporate will make investments closely in its database for AI brokers, making it usually obtainable to all clients. It launched the product, referred to as Lakebase, in June at its annual tech convention. Lakebase, which relies on the open supply database Postgres, is enterprise grade and helps company builders’ vibe-coding initiatives. This makes it a competitor to Supabase.
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“The database market is $105 billion of TAM [total addressable market], of income, sitting there, type of unaffected within the final 40 years,” Ghodsi informed TechCrunch, giving a refined nod to how database large Oracle has had a lock available on the market for many years.
“Right here’s the attention-grabbing statistic no person’s being attentive to: a yr in the past, we noticed within the knowledge that 30% of the databases weren’t created by people. For the primary time, they have been created by AI brokers. And this yr, the statistic is 80%,” he mentioned, including that he predicts this stat to extend to 99% of latest databases inside a yr.
“There’s a brand new person. The person isn’t human. It’s an AI agent, and if we simply double down on making that person persona profitable, that’s the wedge to disrupt that TAM,” he mentioned.
As for the way Lakebase will differentiate from Supabase and others already constructing Postgres-based databases for brokers, Ghodsi mentioned the hot button is “separated compute and storage.”
By untying the expensive compute from the lower-cost storage, Databricks can affordably let customers create many databases. “As a result of these brokers are tremendous quick. They only spin up a lot of databases, a lot sooner than people can, however you don’t need to go bankrupt since you’re doing that,” he defined.
The second mission Databricks might be investing closely in is AI agent platform Agent Bricks, additionally launched in June. “All people’s tremendous centered on superintelligence,” Ghodsi mentioned. “However that’s not what we’d like in organizations.”
Quite than synthetic basic math geniuses or cancer-curing scientists, what firms want are brokers that may reliably deal with, unaided, mundane duties like onboarding workers or answering personalised questions on HR advantages.
“I feel that’s a a lot larger alternative, truly, for the worldwide GDP and for organizations,” he mentioned. He believes that such focus will give Agent Bricks a aggressive benefit.
He additionally raised the additional money so Databricks can get into the AI poaching wars. “As you recognize, it’s fairly costly to rent AI expertise proper now,” he mentioned, smiling.
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