Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and CEO of Databricks Inc., speaks during an interview for Bloomberg Technology television in San Francisco, California, USA, on Tuesday, October 22, 2019.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Databricks, a start-up whose software helps companies quickly process large data sets and prepare them for analysis, said on Monday that it raised $ 1 billion in cash, including some prominent corporate investors. Amazon Web Services, CapitalG’s venture arm of Alphabet and Salesforce Ventures have joined, according to a statement. Microsoft, which previously invested in Databricks, is also participating in the new round, according to a statement.
The transaction, which values Databricks at $ 28 billion, shows that the top three U.S. cloud providers recognize that the company represents an opportunity similar to Snowflake, another company with cloud software that helps companies manage data.
Databricks gained prominence because it helped companies implement a version of Apache Spark, an alternative to Hadoop technology to store many different types of data in large quantities. It can help clean up data for exploration in data visualization software, such as Tableau owned by Salesforce. Databricks software offers companies a simple way to run this type of software, without having to worry about configuring and updating it. Increasingly, Databricks is also increasingly helping organizations to implement artificial intelligence models.
“We are 100 percent native to the cloud,” Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi told CNBC in a 2019 interview. The same principle applies to Snowflake, in which Salesforce also invested and demonstrated strong revenue growth after its offering initial public hearing last year.
Amazon, the largest cloud provider, did not put money into Snowflake before going public. It is now investing in Databricks at a later stage than it did historically.
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