Databricks settles on $5B raise at $190B valuation

Databricks wanted to raise $1 billion. Investors wanted to put in $15 billion. The AI data company settled on $5 billion, closing a round Thursday that pushed its valuation to $190 billion, co-founder and CEO Ali Ghodsi told TechCrunch.

Ghodsi said the fundraise wasn’t originally the plan: a report from The Information saying Databricks was doing a big fundraise, published in the middle of the company’s June conference, set off a wave of inbound interest. “The interest level was just insane. Just from this select group of investors that we looked at, there was $15 billion of interest,” he said. In July, Databricks announced it had closed the round at a $188 billion valuation without disclosing the amount raised; on Thursday, it confirmed the $5 billion figure and the higher $190 billion valuation. The round was led by Coatue and included Blackstone, MGX, several T. Rowe Price accounts, and new investor Sixth Street Growth, among about two dozen participating VCs.

Databricks said it has hit $7 billion in annualized run-rate revenue, growing 80%, and is cash-flow positive. Its core cloud data warehouse product accounts for $1.5 billion of that run rate and is still growing 100% year-over-year, while its database for AI agents, Lakebase, launched in June 2025 and has reached a $100 million revenue run rate. The company has now raised $20 billion over the past 20 months. Ghodsi said the capital will go toward AI research — the company has a 100-person research team — and multibillion-dollar cloud commitments with all three major hyperscalers, as well as continued acquisitions; Databricks bought the Postgres-database startup Electric this week, following June’s purchase of AI cybersecurity company Panther and two more acquisitions in March.

A $1 billion round was once considered a massive raise; today, with AI startups raising that much for a seed or Series A round, Databricks’ repeated multibillion-dollar rounds have become something of a running joke in Silicon Valley — people have joked online that the company is running out of letters of the alphabet for its funding rounds. Ghodsi has told CNBC he still wants to take Databricks public one day, but says the priority for now is investing in AI, away from the scrutiny of public markets.

Why it matters

The raise underscores how selective and in-demand Databricks has become as AI spending balloons — and how comfortable late-stage companies now are raising billions privately rather than rushing toward an IPO.