Imperium Databricks $4B $134B

0:00Databricks has just raised$4 billion at$134 billion valuation. Its AI business is heating up right now and people feel like the IPO window is starting to crack open and this is starting to crack open and this is starting to crack at$4 billion. the description. You get access to models from Databricks, among a ton of other people's tons of open source models, tons of really cool image generators you may not have tried before. You can test all of these models side by side. And for$20 a month, you get access to all of them, OpenAI, Google, Gemini, Grok, 11 Labs for audio, tons of amazing models. I'll leave a link in the description to AIbox.ai.

0:53And I hope that saves you some money. It feels like the market for IPOs is starting to warm up a little bit. It's obviously gone through a long cold winter where a lot of even the biggest companies, I mean, you could talk about like Stripe and SpaceX, these massive companies that in the past traditionally would have 100 % IPO'd by now have not. But there are a bunch of startups that have started to IPO and they've seen some mixed results on the public markets. In the past, this was the number one way that a company was going to raise, you know, all their money. They needed to make it to an IPO.

1:23It was for investors. It was for employees. But it feels like today, there are a ton of startups that have no intention of going public. They've been running as private companies. And I think this makes a lot of sense today because right now you can raise insane amounts of money. I mean, just look at OpenAI's latest$40 billion round. Like that is an absurd amount of money that I think a lot of companies would only dream of raising publicly. And OpenAI was able to raise that privately. So while it feels like you can raise insane amounts of money, what is the well as a private company what is the point of an IPO I think Databricks is asking that question right now it's a data intelligence company they just raised four million dollars this is their series L round like I mentioned this is at 134 billion dollar valuation and that is up 34 percent from their hundred billion dollar valuation that they got just three months ago so like this is massive massive growth I think this is Databricks third major venture raise in less than a year.

2:23And it comes right now, the company is focused on building products that help people in the AI revolution. They are more of like a data kind of not the customer facing company you see, but they are supporting all of the AI models. It's a database for AI agents that they've currently created, they have an agent platform, and they have an app that lets companies deploy and build data and AI applications. So right now they're investing very heavily into their database for AI agents. They call this LakeBase. It's based on an open source database called Postgres, which is enabled by a$1 billion acquisition of a startup called Neon.

3:04And it is aimed at corporate developers. So people that are vibe coding projects. I think right now their AI agent platform, which is called Agent Bricks, is also aimed at helping businesses build and deploy AI agents that can cap into their data. So the company has a whole bunch of really big deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars with AI Labs. They have some with Anthropic and also with OpenAI. And they're offering their models within the enterprise products of OpenAI and Anthropic. So they have a lot of these big deals. This Series L round, I would say, isn't very common. Like you don't commonly see a Series L round.

3:41Databricks obviously has managed to raise venture funding after, you know, they just keep raising their valuation. It was at$60 billion around this time last year. And so obviously, you know, being able to raise this all the way up to$134 billion is an impressive feat. I think it just shows how strong investors believe in, you know, some of these companies that are helping use data to fuel AI and everything that's happening in that space. on Tuesday Databricks said that it now generates a run rate revenue of more than 4.8 billion dollars and that's up 55 percent from a year ago so of all of that more than a billion dollars came from its AI product so Databricks is obviously on an absolute tear this is what they said about it when when asked in a press release I believe they said the parallel rise of vibe coding and generative AI is accelerating the development of AI intelligent applications in the enterprise Databricks will use this new capital to help customers build AI apps and agents on their proprietary data, leveraging Lakebase as a system of record, Databricks apps as the user experience later, and Agentbricks to power multi-agent systems.

4:54So the Wall Street Journal was just reporting on this and they said that the company is also going to use some of the new money to add thousands of new jobs in Asia, Europe, Latin America, as well as bringing on a bunch of new AI researchers. And And I would say, you know, don't underestimate how expensive that can be. We've seen Mark Zuckerberg offer, I mean, you know, he denies it, but basically billion-dollar pay packages to AI researchers when it comes to not just their pay, but when it comes to equity and stock and a bunch of other things. Like, these AI researchers are paid in enormous amounts of money.

5:26So Databricks need some of the top-tier, I think, researchers right now because of the place that they're sitting and the companies that they're working with, and that will cost them a lot of money. So the need to continue to raise money in order to do that. The co-founder and CEO is Ali Godzi. And talking about all of this said, enterprises are rapidly reimagining how they build intelligent applications and the convergence of generative AI with new coding paradigms is opening the door to entirely new workloads. I think this is a really interesting time to watch the company grow and the whole industry.

5:59This latest round that they just raised, It was led by Insight Partners, Fidelity, JP Morgan Asset Management, Andresen Horwitz, BlackRock, Blackstone, KOTU, GIC, MGX, NEA, Ontario Teacher, Pension Plan, Robinhood Ventures. I mean, basically, they had Thrive Capital on here. Like, it feels like all the big players jumped in on this round. The only person I'm seeing missing here is NVIDIA, who I typically would have expected on a round like this to contribute. But a lot of big players on this round. and so it seems like you know this isn't uh just one or two strategic partners this is all the top suspect vc firms uh getting in on this i think it signals it's a really strong signal for databricks that a couple things are happening the revenue is growing the demand for their products is increasing and they have a lot of big key strategic partnerships with opening an anthropic so i would continue i would expect to continue seeing databricks grow in the future and probably grow almost just as rapidly as they've been doing.

6:57I mean, up 55 % since last year is some incredible metrics and some incredible growth. So hopefully we continue to see that and a big congratulations to everyone over on the team at Databricks. Thanks so much for tuning into the podcast. If you learned anything new today, make sure to leave a rating and review wherever you get your podcasts on Apple or Spotify. I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day and make sure to check out AIbox.ai. I'll leave a link to that in the description.