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 had raised $ 1 billion in new cash, including from a few prominent corporate investors. Amazon Web Services, Alphabet’s venture capital arm Alphabet and Salesforce Ventures have joined, according to a statement. Microsoft, which earlier 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 US cloud providers recognize that the company represents a similar opportunity to Snowflake, another cloud software company that helps companies manage data.
Databricks became important because it helped companies implement a version of Apache Spark, an alternative to Hadoop technology for storing many different types of data in massive amounts. It can help clean up data for exploration in data visualization software, such as Tableau owned by Salesforce. Databricks software gives companies an easy way to run this type of software without having to worry about setting it up and updating it. Databricks is increasingly helping organizations implement artificial intelligence models.
“We are 100% cloud-native,” Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi told CNBC in a 2019 interview. The same principle applies to Snowflake, in which Salesforce invested and demonstrated strong revenue growth in following its initial public offering last year.
Amazon, the largest cloud provider, did not put money in Snowflake before it was published. It is now investing in Databricks at a later stage than it has historically done.
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