Big Data Firm Databricks Raises $1 Billion

San Francisco-based big data and artificial intelligence (AI) solutions firm Databricks has raised $1 billion in a Series G round of funding, which it says it will use to support the adoption of its data architecture.

Founded by the team who created big data processing engine Apache Spark, and built on a lakehouse architecture in the cloud, Databricks offers a unified online platform for data engineering, machine learning, and analytics workloads. Resulting data can be shared and exported into a dynamic dashboard, and cells, visualizations, or notebooks can also be shared with role-based access control and exported in multiple formats including HTML and IPython Notebook.

The firm's new funding has been led by new investor Franklin Templeton, with participation from other new investors including Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, Fidelity Management & Research LLC, and Whale Rock, as well as a host of investors including Amazon Web Services (AWS), CapitalG and Salesforce Ventures. Existing investors participating in the round included Microsoft. This latest round values Databricks at $28 billion.

Ali Ghodsi (pictured), CEO and co-founder of Databricks, comments: 'We see this investment and our continued rapid growth as further validation of our vision for a simple, open and unified data platform that can support all data-driven use cases, from BI to AI. Databricks helps organizations eliminate the cost and complexity that is inherent in legacy data architectures so that data teams can collaborate and innovate faster. This lakehouse paradigm is what's fueling our growth, and it's great to see how excited our investors are to be a part of it.'

Web site: www.databricks.com .