Unified analytics firm Databricks said that it has raised $250 million in a Series E funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Coatue Management, Microsoft, and New Enterprise Associates (NEA) also participated. This most recent round of funding brings Databricks’ total amount raised to $498.5 million and raises the company’s valuation to $2.75 billion. The company said that growing demand of its Unified Analytics Platform led the company to exceed $100 million in annual recurring revenue during 2018 and experience approximately 3x year-over-year growth in subscription revenue during the last quarter of 2018.
“Databricks has gone from almost no revenue to over $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. “What’s driving this incredible growth is the market’s massive appetite for Unified Analytics. 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 is the clear winner in the big data platform race,” said Ben Horowitz, co-founder and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. “In addition, they have created a new category atop their world-beating Apache Spark platform called Unified Analytics that is growing even faster. As a result, we are thrilled to invest in this round.”
Unified Analytics makes it easier for enterprises to build data pipelines across various siloed data storage systems and to prepare labelled datasets for model building — this allows organizations to do data science on massive data sets. In addition to eliminating the challenges of data silos and the gap between data processing and machine learning platforms, Unified Analytics also addresses the lack of communication between data scientists and engineers. Because it provides a common and collaborative platform for data science and engineering, the Databricks Unified Analytics Platform helps organizations accelerate innovation and achieve AI success faster.
Over 2,000 organizations globally, such as Nielsen, Hotels.com, Overstock, Bechtel, Shell and HP, are leveraging Databricks to unify data science and data engineering teams across the end-to-end data and machine learning lifecycle.
Accelerating the adoption of Databricks’ Unified Analytics Platform in 2018 was the availability of Azure Databricks, a first-party integrated Microsoft Azure service. Azure Databricks was built in collaboration with Microsoft to simplify the process of big data and AI solutions by combining the best of Databricks and Azure. Azure customers are able to get Azure Databricks from Microsoft and begin using it with the touch of a button, as they would any Azure service. Building on the shared success the two companies have had with Azure Databricks, Microsoft is a new investor in this funding round.
“Databricks has shown tremendous leadership in big data, 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. “This investment builds on our successful multi-year partnership around Azure Databricks, a first-party Azure service that in conjunction with other Azure Data services like Azure Data Warehouse is greatly simplifying big data analytics and artificial intelligence solutions for many Microsoft customers.”
