Cloud data company Databricks recently announced the completion of its first round of funding, raising $500 million from major investor accounts led by T. Rowe and new investors Capital One Ventures, Ghisallo Capital Management, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan and Nvidia.
According to Databricks, the latest round of investment valued the company at $43 billion and the stock price was $73.50. In 2021, the company raised US$1.6 billion in Series H financing, valuing it at US$38 billion.
Databricks’ financial partnership with Nvidia demonstrates growing synergies between the two artificial intelligence (AI) companies, with generative AI for enterprise data a key driver of the financing.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang called enterprise data “a gold mine for generative AI” in a Databricks press release, adding, “Databricks is doing incredible work leveraging Nvidia technology to accelerate data processing and generative AI.” AI models.”
Databricks is best known for its “Lakehouse” platform. Lakehouse essentially combines a data warehouse with a data lake for seamless developer workflow access.
According to the company’s press release:
“Databricks Lakehouse unifies data, analytics and AI on a single platform so customers can govern, manage and derive insights from enterprise data and build their own generative AI solutions faster.”
Lakehouse enables enterprise customers to build their own generative AI models—sort of like ChatGPT-style AI systems that are trained solely on the customer’s internal data. This architecture puts privacy controls within the purview of business clients and allows enterprises to fine-tune models to suppress unwanted or erroneous outputs.
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With a valuation of $43 billion, Databricks is one of the most highly valued artificial intelligence companies in existence in the United States, although competitors include trillion-dollar companies such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Cloud and Google Cloud.
Its main competitor, Snowflake, has a market capitalization of about $51 billion. It is worth noting that Capital One is one of the investment companies in the latest round of Databricks financing and is also one of Snowflake’s largest enterprise customers.
