Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and CEO of Databricks Inc., speaks during a Bloomberg Technology television interview in San Francisco, California, USA, on Tuesday, October 22, 2019.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Databricks said Tuesday it raised $ 1.6 billion in a round of H-Series funding that values the enterprise software company at $ 38 billion. That’s a $ 10 billion increase since February, when he added Amazon, Google and Salesforce as investors in a $ 1 billion independent capital increase.
The company has raised nearly $ 3.6 billion to date and is poised to generate $ 1 billion or more in revenue by 2022, up 75% year-over-year. The company claims its annual recurring revenue has risen to $ 600 million, up from $ 425 million the previous year.
Its latest round of financing is led by Morgan Stanley’s Global Counterpoint fund and includes new investors Baillie Gifford and New York City-based ClearBridge Investments. Existing investors such as BlackRock, Andreessen Horowitz, Tiger Global Management, T. Rowe Price Associates and Fidelity Investments also participated in the round.
Databricks gained prominence because they helped companies implement a version of Apache Spark, an alternative to Hadoop technology to store many types of data in large quantities. It can help clean up data for browsing in data visualization programs, such as Tableau owned by Salesforce. Databricks software provides companies with an easy way to run this type of software without having to worry about setting it up and updating it. Databricks is also increasingly helping organizations like Comcast, Shell, Expedia and Regeneron deploy artificial intelligence models. It claims to serve more than 5,000 such customers in 19 countries.
The company said it will use the latter funding to duplicate its open source project called Data Lakehouse. This project allows organizations to transform existing cluttered data lakes (centralized repositories that can store structured and unstructured data) into clean Delta Lakes with high-quality data, thus accelerating their data initiatives and machine learning.
“This new investment reflects the rapid adoption and incredible demand from the customers we are seeing … and underscores the confidence of the industry and investors in our vision,” CEO Ali Ghodsi said in a press release announcing the transaction. “This marks an exciting new chapter that will allow us to accelerate our pace of innovation and invest even more in the success of data-driven organizations on their journey to the lake house.”
To support the acceleration of its lake technology, Databricks will also incorporate former Salesforce executive Andy Kofoid as president of global field operations.
—CNBC’s Jordan Novet contributed to this report.
Disclosure: Comcast is the owner of NBCUniversal, CNBC’s parent company.
Databricks is a two-time CNBC Disruptor 50 company that ranked 37th on this year’s list. Sign up for our original weekly newsletter that goes beyond Disruptor 50’s annual list, which offers a closer look at initial trends and founders who continue to innovate in all sectors of the economy.