Databricks keeps building with $250m funding
Databricks, an analytics firms founded by the creators of the computing framework Apache Spark, has secured $250 million in a Series E funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz.
Microsoft has taken a liking to Databricks, it seems.
Coatue Management, Microsoft, and New Enterprise Associates (NEA) also participated.
This most recent round brings Databricks’ total amount raised to $498.5 million and raises the company’s valuation to $2.75 billion.
“Databricks has gone from almost no revenue to over $100 million in annual recurring revenue in just three years,” says Ali Ghodsi, CEO and co-founder of Databricks. “Organisations need to achieve success with their artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives and this requires a unified analytics platform that bridges the divide between big data and machine learning.”
Databricks’ platform lets firms build data pipelines across various siloed data storage systems and to prepare labelled datasets for model building.
The firm says that it eliminates the challenges of data silos and the gap between data processing and machine learning platforms, as well as addressing the lack of communication between data scientists and engineers.
It has around 2,000 clients – and customers include Nielsen, Hotels.com, Overstock, Bechtel, Shell and HP.
Azure Databricks, which “boosted” the adoption of the platform, was built in collaboration with Microsoft for the processing of big data and AI solutions by combining Databricks and Azure.
