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, a start-up whose software helps companies quickly process large data sets and prepare them for analysis, said Monday it raised $ 1 billion in new cash, including some prominent corporate investors. Amazon Web Services, Alphabet’s venture capital branch and Salesforce Ventures merged, according to a statement. Microsoft, which previously invested in Databricks, is also participating in the new round, according to a statement.
The transaction, which values Databricks at $ 28 billion, shows that the top three U.S. cloud providers recognize that the company represents a similar opportunity to Snowflake, another cloud software company that helps companies manage data.
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 massive quantities. It can help clean up data for browsing in data visualization programs, such as Tableau owned by Salesforce. Databricks software offers companies an easy way to run this type of software without having to worry about setting it up and updating it. Increasingly, Databricks is also increasingly helping organizations deploy artificial intelligence models.
“We are 100% cloud natives,” Ali Ghodsi, CEO of Databricks, told CNBC in a 2019 interview. This same principle applies to Snowflake, in which Salesforce had also invested and which has shown strong growth in revenue after its initial public offering last year.
Amazon, the largest cloud provider, did not put money on Snowflake before it was made public. He is now investing in Databricks at a later stage than he has historically done.
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