Databricks Adds Yet More Funds, Targets AI Innovations

Data management and integration platform Databricks is currently closing a new funding round worth around $1bn, and valuing the company at around $100bn, according to reports. The latest investment will go towards development of a database for AI Agents, and of its own agent.

Databricks is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices around the globe and was founded by the original creators of Lakehouse, Apache Spark, Delta Lake and Mlflow. The Databricks Data Intelligence Platform brings together data, analytics and AI/machine learning to help clients govern, manage and derive insights from enterprise data and build their own generative AI solutions.

Described by sources quoted on news site TechCrunch as 'wildly oversubscribed', the new raise adds to a huge round of $10bn secured in December, and brings the firm's total funding to date to around $20bn. The latest round, like the previous one, was co-led by Thrive and Insight Partners.

Databricks co-founder and CEO Ali Ghodsi told TechCrunch in an interview that the new money is earmarked for two specific projects - the Lakebase database for AI agents, which is to be generally available to all the company's customers; and its AI agent platform 'Agent Bricks'. Ghodsi said data on the $105bn database market suggests that last year 30% of databases 'were not created by humans' but by AI agents. This year, he says, the figure is 80% and next year he expects it to be 99%. 'There's a new user. The user is not human. It's an AI agent, and if we just double down on making that user persona successful, that's the wedge to disrupt that TAM [total addressable market]'.

Regarding Agent Bricks, Ghodsi said 'Everybody's super focused on superintelligence, but that's not what we need in organizations.' What companies need are 'agents that can reliably handle, unaided, mundane tasks like onboarding employees or answering personalized questions about HR benefits.' [TechCrunch]

Web sites: www.techcrunch.com and www.databricks.com .