Databricks Secures $1B G Round at $28B Valuation

February 1, 2021

Databricks secured a $1 Billion investment in response to the rapid global adoption of its unified data platform. The Series G funding, led by new investor Franklin Templeton, puts Databricks at a $28 billion post-money valuation. Franklin Templeton is joined by other new investors including Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, Fidelity Management & Research LLC, and Whale Rock, along with new strategic investors Amazon Web Services (AWS), CapitalG and Salesforce Ventures. Existing investors participating in the round include Microsoft, Andreessen Horowitz, Alkeon Capital Management, funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, Coatue Management, funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc. and Tiger Global Management.

“We see this investment and our continued rapid growth as further validation of our vision for a simple, open and unified data platform that can support all data-driven use cases, from BI to AI,” said Ali Ghodsi, CEO and Co-Founder of Databricks. “Built on a modern lakehouse architecture in the cloud, Databricks helps organizations eliminate the cost and complexity that is inherent in legacy data architectures so that data teams can collaborate and innovate faster. This lakehouse paradigm is what’s fueling our growth, and it’s great to see how excited our investors are to be a part of it.”

This funding will accelerate Databricks’ innovation and allow the company to scale and support the rapid adoption of the lakehouse, which is quickly becoming the data architecture of choice for data-driven organizations around the world.

“Franklin Templeton is excited to work with Databricks as they enter this next stage of their impressive journey. We’ve seen first hand their ability to help enterprises leverage data to better understand customer journeys, operationalize business processes and, ultimately, build competitive advantage rooted in data. We believe they have a strong, accomplished team and visionary platform, and believe that the future for Databricks is bright, with a clear leadership position and open-ended growth opportunity,” said Jonathan Curtis, Senior Vice President, Research Analyst and Portfolio Manager, Franklin Templeton.

“Azure Databricks continues to be an impressive solution that brings the latest advances in open, flexible and scalable data and AI capabilities to our customers,” said Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President, Cloud + AI, Microsoft Corp. “Our investment underscores the vision we share with Databricks of simplifying data and AI for our customers. Together, we will continue to build on the success of Azure Databricks and seamless integrations across Azure data services to enable cloud-scale analytics and AI on Azure.”

Other existing and new Investors that participated in this funding round include: Discovery Capital, Dragoneer Investment Group, Founders Circle Capital, Geodesic, GIC, Green Bay Ventures, Greenoaks Capital, New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Octahedron Capital.