Top 3 US cloud providers invests in a USD28 billion startup

Databricks, a data-and-AI focused startup that interacts with corporate information stored in the public cloud, has raised USD1 billion Series G at a whopping USD28 billion post-money valuation.

Franklin Templeton led the round, which also included new investors Fidelity and Whale Rock. According to a statement, Amazon Web Services, Alphabet’s CapitalG venture arm and Salesforce Ventures all joined in and raised part of the capital. Microsoft, a previous investor in Databricks, also participated in the new round.

The transaction shows the top three US cloud providers recognise that the company represents an opportunity similar to Snowflake, another firm with cloud software that helps companies manage data. Snowflake, raised almost a half a billion dollars on a USD12.4 billion valuation a year ago before going public last September with a valuation twice that.

Databricks has already exceeded that public valuation with this round as a private company.

Databricks rose to prominence because it helped companies implement a version of Apache Spark, an alternative to the Hadoop technology for storing lots of different kinds of data in massive quantities. The company is also increasingly helping organisations deploy artificial intelligence models.

In a 2019 CNBC interview,  Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi, said they are 100 percent cloud-native. That same principle applies to Snowflake, which Salesforce had also invested in and has demonstrated strong revenue growth following its initial public offering last year. During the USD400 million round in 2019, the CEO said his company was the fastest-growing enterprise cloud software companies ever.

Amazon, the largest cloud provider, has not historically done many late-stage startup investments. is now investing in Databricks.