Databricks Raises $400M, Hires CFO

Although Databricks is fairly young, the data product company has pulled in tons of cash and is growing fast.

In fact, the company has raised $400 million in a new round of funding and hired Splunk chief financial officer Dave Conte as CFO, the company announced Tuesday.

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The new round was led by Andreessen Horowitz’s Late-Stage Venture Fund and values Databricks at $6.2 billion. Andreessen’s backed Databricks since the beginning, leading its $14 million Series A in 2013 and most recently leading its $250 million Series E in February.

The Series F round brings Databricks’ total funding to $897 million, according to Crunchbase.

Most of the new funding will be going toward research and development, according to Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi. The company will invest €100 million into its new European Data Center in Amsterdam over the next three years.

“Our bets on massive data processing, machine learning, open source and the shift to the Cloud are all playing out in the market and resulting in enormous and rapidly growing global customer demand,” Ali said in a statement. “As a result, Databricks is the fastest growing enterprise software cloud company on record.”

Teams in the United States and Europe will focus on developing Databricks’ four projects: the Delta Lake Project, which has more than 4,000 customers; MLflow, which is only a year old but has 800,000 downloads per month; the Koalas project, which is rapidly developing and its Apache Spark project.

Databricks has grown its annual recurring revenue more than 2.5x over the past year, according to a statement, and has gone from virtually no revenue to a $200 million revenue run rate in less than four years.

IPO, Not Yet

An IPO is something the company will probably do at some point in the future, Ghodsi said, but not any time soon.

“We think we’re going to be an independent, viable business for many, many years to come,” Ghodsi said.

Ghodsi said he couldn’t imagine how fast the company’s grown and its now $6.2 billion valuation when Databricks was in its infancy.

In 2012 when Ghodsi and Databricks’ co-founders were dreaming up the company, others were skeptical about how much success there could be with the cloud, machine learning, and open source. All three bets evidently paid off.

“Everybody was saying we were wrong,” Ali recalled.

Databricks’ new funding round, which includes investors like Alkeon Capital Management, Coatue Management, and Green Bay Ventures, comes just as the company brings on a CFO, Dave Conte.

Conte was most recently CFO at Splunk for the past eight years, and helped take the company public.

“He’s well-versed, well-liked by analysts all around so we’re super super excited for him to join as CFO,” Ghodsi said.

Illustration Credit: Li-Anne Dias