Centific’s Role in AI Boom, Databricks $134B Valuation, Alien Hunter Funding | Dec 16, 2025

0:13Welcome, everyone, to the Informations TI TV. My name is Akash Pasricha. It is Tuesday, December 16th. We have a lot of ground to cover today. First up, Databricks announced a new$4 billion funding ground valuing the company at$134 billion. We will break that all down for you. Next up, one small bank is making a big move, tightening its risk controls. That matters because it is a critical bridge between overseas stablecoin users and the traditional US financial system. We will explain what's changing and why. We're then bringing on Sapphire Ventures to talk about their enterprise software predictions for the coming year.

0:50And you won't want to miss this. Could Jensen Huang help fund the search for extraterrestrial life? We'll tell you why a group of alien hunters wants to partner with the NVIDIA CEO on an AI-powered telescope. And finally, we will end the show with a conversation with Scientific, a fast-growing player in the arena of data labeling and model customization. It is a big show, so let's get right on into things. Databricks today announced a$4 billion Series L investment valuing the company at$134 billion. The firm also says that it surpassed a$4.8 billion revenue run rate in the third quarter, growing over 55 % from the previous year.

1:32Joining me now to discuss this is our enterprise software reporter, Kevin McLaughlin. Kevin, welcome back to the show. It's great to have you here. Thanks, Akash, for having me. So it feels like Databricks announces these private fundraisings on what, like a quarterly cadence now? Yeah. I mean, what can you say at this point? It was a$100 billion valuation a couple months ago, and now it's$134. I think the way to look at Databricks and all of this fundraising they're doing is that no one has really established themselves as the dominant company in AI agents for the enterprise. I was at AWS reInvent last month and a lot of the discussions I had there with AWS executives as well as their software partners was around this theme of AWS thinks that it's still a wide open space and it's anyone's game.

2:26So Databricks needs to raise lots of money because it also has an almost identical array of offerings as the cloud providers do. Databricks has tools for preparing your data, storing your data, and most importantly, building AI agents which tap into your data and allow you to customize it for various use cases. So not really surprised, actually, to see the announcement. So I'm interested to hear you say that the Databricks is really going head to head with the cloud providers because at least a year ago or maybe two years ago, I mean, the conversation was really Databricks versus Snowflake, right?

3:02That was the rivalry that people talked about. And here you have Databricks now that's growing much faster than Snowflake. It's a much bigger company. What happened to that rivalry? Oh, it's still definitely going on. Databricks versus Snowflake. It's the Hatfields and McCoys of the enterprise software market. I think Snowflake has got a sort of slightly different focus. They've all got the same tools. And Snowflake, they both have data warehouses and Snowflake has big aspirations in AI as well as its own AI agent building platform. I think the difference is, from my perspective at least, is that Databricks has started to separate itself as more of an AI-native company than Snowflake has.

3:47Snowflake's roots are into the traditional enterprise, and CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy has been trying to steer the company more into AI, and that's a work in progress. Whereas Databricks, I think, has a little bit of a head start in this space. And I think the perception is that if you want to do AI today, you know, you can go to both of them. You can go to either one. But from my perspective, Databricks is a little bit ahead. Right. And last question for you on this topic, what do you think the implications are for Databricks staying private even longer? We saw that SpaceX has finally started to pivot a little bit towards an IPO.

4:26Databricks is one that people are watching. And the implications here are what? I'm not inside the head of CEO Ali Gozi or the Databricks board. I would venture to say that maybe there's a belief that things are going to cool down at some point, and maybe it might be advantageous to not be a public company at that point. On the other hand, they seem to be growing. And importantly, in this latest round, they're allowing employees to do secondary share sales. So retention shouldn't be a problem. And actually, I saw in the funding announcement that they're planning to grow the already very large employee base by several thousand employees.

5:13So yeah, they called out recent, they said recent college graduates. Is that what they said? I didn't see that part. Okay. Well, maybe I'm making that up. I don't know. I felt like I read that. But anyway, I did see that they're hiring a lot. So, yeah, I mean, it sounds like they are certainly growing quickly on all vectors. I want to pivot to a piece that you wrote in our Applied AI newsletter. You talked about the surge of these customer chatbots. And I say customer chatbots. I mean, the surge in chatbots, period, that are being used at companies to deal with customers and then also to deal with employees.

5:49I mean, talk a little bit about the competition here, because, I mean, there are so many different players. There's Sierra, there's Decagon, there's Ada. Is there any way to differentiate all these players? Yeah, it's not unlike what I just described, where everyone is building platforms for building AI agents for the enterprise. Chatbots have been greeting visitors to websites for many years. And before generative AI arrived, they were pretty useless, actually. They'd say, hey, I'm here to help you. Can I answer your questions? And you would ask it a question, and it would say, well, here's a link, or I don't know.

6:29So AI has definitely changed the game a lot. Now, what we noticed a couple weeks ago, we reported that Sierra had built a chatbot for Gap, Inc., one of its new customers. And this chatbot was engaging on topics that it shouldn't have, just going way off topic. And so I think that sort of spurred me to kind of look at other websites that have these assistants that pop up when you visit the website and you start browsing through products. And the newsletter we have going today is about how a couple of these websites clearly haven't locked down the chatbots enough because they were, you know, one of them was talking about, you know, you could say, hey, I'm planning a holiday party.

7:17Like, what should I do? And it would actually engage on the topic and give you advice. And then it went even further because you could ask, well, what if somebody slips and falls at my party? Would I be legally liable? And oh, by the way, how should I approach the treatment medically? And so these are clearly topics that the chatbots shouldn't be engaging in and might open the companies up to some sort some form of liability and so what are the companies telling you about this well uh glean is one example of a chatbot that we're reporting on this morning um they said that they have uh they've changed the configuration to to stop it and i think in a lot of cases they're just not expecting website visitors to come in and start asking these kinds of questions so i think it's a reflection of how you know companies are adopting ai in customer facing situations and they just you know these these implementations are still fairly new and um maybe they haven't thought through all the the possibilities um but yeah glean says that they've fixed their chatbot great well kevin i i certainly use them and so it's interesting to hear how the companies are thinking about them on the back end.

8:32It's kind of hard to avoid them. Of course, to be frank, I still just ask for a person at the end of the whole exchange. So I'm still holding out for a little bit of improvement. Kevin, thank you so much for coming on. That is Kevin McLaughlin, our enterprise software reporter here at The Information. The crypto sector is trying to build a new decentralized financial system, but in many ways, much of the core infrastructure is still tied to the traditional financial system. Today, the information published a story with another data point to that effect focused on stable coins. I want to bring on Yueqi Yang, our crypto reporter, to tell us more about what she's learned.

9:09Yueqi, welcome back to the show. It's great to have you here. Hey, Akash. So in your piece today, you focus on this bank, LeadBank. Tell us about LeadBank. It's not one that I've heard of. Why should we be focused on them? Lee Bank has emerged as the most important banking providers for the stablecoin payment industry in the past two years. Most of the most popular stablecoin startups that you might have heard of, such as Bridge, which was acquired by Stripe this year, rely on Lee Bank to provide their services. And as you mentioned, it's not a household name, but Lee Bank is very important for the sector, which is why we took a deeper look into the services that it provides, but also some of the changes that it's imposing.

9:59And I will mention that Leibank is a community bank based in Kansas City. It is a small bank. It has about$2 billion in assets. Right. Now, when you say the services that it provides to companies issuing stablecoins, what exactly are these services? The most important service is to provide bank accounts for the end users of stable coins. Oftentimes these are people and businesses in emerging markets such as Argentina, Mexico, where they're hoping to receive U.S. dollar for remittances or for their salary from their employers outside of their own country so that they can get the U.S. dollar, store their wealth in U.S.

10:44dollar currency. and there's this whole group of stablecoin startups that have popped up to serve this need for these users. And they do need a bank in the middle of this because a way for them to receive the US dollar. So I didn't realize this and maybe I've just been missing it, but if I wanted to pay for something with USDC or with any stablecoin, I mean, if I go about buying USDC, in the back end, there will be a bank account that is opened for me, essentially holding the reserves? I mean, what is being held in that bank account? The bank account essentially provides you a way to on-ramp and off-ramp between the real economy and the stable coin crypto world.

11:37And that's where the bank account is needed. For example, there are U.S. companies that are paying overseas suppliers and employees using U.S. dollar. And these stablecoin startups will convert that U.S. dollar from this bank account into stablecoins so that they send it across the border in a faster and cheaper way. Okay. So now what are the changes that LeadBank is making now, according to your reporting? In the past few months, we have found out signs that LeadBank is tightening its risk control when it comes to its services for stablecoin startups. And specifically, it's increasing restrictions for certain countries and sectors where it would accept clients from.

12:27And we also come across signs where it's taking longer for the banks to review transactions. And this is because they need time to verify the source of funding and to strengthen their confidence in the identity of the account holders that are making use of their bank accounts. So based on your reporting here, it sounds like there are some technical challenges that have led to it tightening its regulations. Are there broader reasons why the company is taking sort of a tighter approach to how it works with stablecoins?

13:09Yes. For a bank, to be able to serve stablecoin startups, especially the ones that are having a lot of users in a wide range of countries, this is always a high-risk line of business. because it brings your compliance team a greater challenge when it comes to monitoring the risk across layers of vendors and also verifying the source of fund. And it is a reason why a lot of the other banks are reluctant to get into this business, which is much needed for all these stablecoin startups that have popped up this year after the passage of Genius Law. And that's why it gives room for lead banks to play such an outsized role.

13:58But it also requires lead banks to have a strong compliance process that allows them to monitor these risks properly. Right. And so, Yueqi, for people reading this story, it's a story that is somewhat in the weeds in terms of how these stablecoins work in the background. At a really high level, why should people be paying attention to this? Is this a signal for what's to come with stablecoins? Could they at all become more restricted if these banks decide that they don't want to work with stablecoins? How are you thinking about that? I think given that so many people are paying attention to stablecoins this year, it is important for them to understand where the risk for the broader stablecoin sector might be emerging and who are some of the biggest players that are serving outside roles in this market.

14:54and that's why we highlighted LeadBank. And the changes that LeadBank make will have ripple effect across a long list of stablecoin providers. Right. And as you say, I mean, LeadBank is not the only bank, but it's still a small number of banks that are supporting this type of work. So it's certainly a bit of a bottleneck, it sounds like, in terms of how stablecoins will grow in the future. Yueqi, thank you so much for coming on the show. We really appreciate it and we look forward to having you back again soon. Okay. ServiceNow's Moveworks acquisition closed this week, but ServiceNow shareholders appeared to be somewhat spooked by the news that it could be nearing another big acquisition, this time in the cybersecurity space.

15:36ServiceNow belongs to the pool of software companies that are trying to figure out how to get businesses to buy their AI tools. And these days, the question on my mind is how that conversation is going to change in 2026, if at all. I want to bring on Rajiv Dahm, managing partner at Sapphire Ventures, who has invested in many enterprise software companies and many AI companies, not the least of which is Moveworks. Rajiv, welcome to the show. It's great to have you here. Great to be here. Thanks for having me. So I trust that you are closely following ServiceNow, given that you sold a company to ServiceNow by way of Moveworks.

16:14What did you make about the market jitters this week that companies making another acquisition, stock falls more than I think it was 11 %? I mean, we wrote last night in our nightly briefing, it seemed like a little bit of an overreaction given the company is still growing pretty healthily and the rule of 40 is far north of that. Yeah, listen, I think the financial results are strong at this point. As you can probably tell, the public market feels like it's in a risk-off mode, likely to do some profit-taking at the end of the year, but also, listen, the NASDAQ's up 20 % year-to-date for the second or third blockbuster year in a row.

16:51And I think everyone's still sort of worried, investors alike, about which companies are AI haves versus AI have-nots, who are the AI beneficiaries. And so this is mostly based on my senses, at least ServiceNow potentially maybe losing the perception, at least for the moment, around the innovation race because they've had a string of large M &A transactions. But in my view, I think these transactions are a signal of them being aggressive and getting ahead of the AI innovation race and curve. And what do you make about them diving deeper into cybersecurity? I mean, look, when it comes to ServiceNow, we know it's ITSM or the backend IT processes.

17:30We know they're going deep into CRM software competing with Salesforce. Cybersecurity, I mean, I know they do everything, but it's not the first thing I think of them for. For sure, for sure. And I think it's them expanding their TAM, listen, no service now expert here. But I will say cybersecurity and cloud security in general is one of the hottest sectors we see in venture land, given some public offerings and how those companies are valued. And it is also an AI beneficiary. There's so many tailwinds around cloud and cybersecurity sort of getting stronger or more valuable in the face of AI that I think it makes all the sense in the world.

18:06And if you think about a CISO and security sitting adjacent to IT, I could see how this is a natural adjacency for service now to get into. Right. Now, before you came on the show earlier this week, I had asked you for a couple predictions that I wanted to talk about on the show for 2026. And you sent through a list of them. And one of the ones I wanted to unpack with you is you said that agents will converge in 2026. And I wanted to ask you a little bit for what you meant by that. Yeah, I think right now we have a bunch of agents that are focused on very narrow slices. And I do think that there is an opportunity for enterprises to have one singular agent, for example, responsible for customer conversations.

18:48Right now, there's agents that do very thin slices of conversations as it relates to customer support or sales or marketing, for example, on behalf of a merchant or an enterprise talking to end consumers. I think there's going to be some sort of orchestration layer that may be sort of obfuscated from the end user customer in that case, or specifically one agent that is going to sort of converge across everything on the enterprise. I actually think even more exciting, maybe for us as consumers, you're going to see that on the consumer side. Everyone's been talking about an operator, agent, book your tickets and restaurants.

19:20I think you're also going to see that on the consumer side finally start to unlock. Right. And so what happens to the startups here that are playing sort of in these silos? I mean, this is a conversation we have on this show all the time. It feels like these enterprise software companies are really starting to converge. Is this consolidation? Is this acquisitions? Is this M &A? Well, I think most of the companies that are in the startup phase mostly grow organically. And so you're going to see them sort of just expand their set of use cases and training for the enterprises that they serve and their set of integrations in order to nail more conversations than just sort of one type and one modality.

19:59And so I think you're going to see startups sort of tackle it. I think more so than that, I think the signal to noise ratio in 2026 is going to be at an all-time high. And one of the hardest things of our job right now is there's a lot of noise out there. Who's actually generating ROI and value to the enterprise? I think it's not just because the startup's going to become better, but the enterprises are going to learn how not to experiment, how to procure actually the best AI agent products. And so you're going to see a lot more signaling enterprises. And those studies like the MIT one that we had a few months ago are going to sort of flip on its head come 2026.

20:31And so that's what we're most excited about. Now, another prediction you had is you said that Anthropic will discover its next major application. We obviously associate Anthropic and Claude with their coding traction that they've gotten. But what do you think that next application is? Yeah, listen, I think these folks are going to pick off the widest and most homogenous sort of application areas. So maybe it could be customer support or something where, you know, whether you are a large enterprise or an e-commerce merchant, the amount of training and fine-tuning integrations that you need might not be that disparate.

21:09And so maybe they'll provide, will they solve all the way to the last mile that a top end application layer will? Perhaps not, but I could see them moving up and up in the stack to tackle the next application area. Okay. And what would that application area be in your view? Yeah. Yeah. I think customer support could be a very interesting one for that. Okay. Okay. What about, I mean, you also talked about legal, you know, legal. That's an area that you think is going to take off in 26? Yeah, I mean, legal's already sort of taken off. You see Harvey and LeGuard. I know, it's hard to imagine he gets bigger.

21:44I know, I know. No, I think it is going to get bigger. I mean, these companies have gone from being secure sort of chat GPT for lawyers. Yeah. They're now actually doing a portion of the work. So it's 5 % productivity to being 30 % productivity. So the sort of revenue model and billing model that they're able to capture and therefore the market size of these businesses is just going to explode in the coming years. Great. Well, Rajiv, I want to thank you for coming on the show. It's a great conversation and look forward to talking to you again very soon. Thanks, Akash. Take care. Talk soon. Okay.

22:15Prediction markets have taken the world by storm, but our newsroom has done some interesting reporting around questions that have surfaced that some people might be insider trading using these new betting platforms. I want to bring on my colleague Rocket Drew, who wrote a story on that to talk about what he's hearing. Rocket, welcome back to the show. It's great to have you here. Thanks, Akash. Great to be here. So let me ask you this. Do we know that people are insider trading on these platforms? Is it a hunch? Is it stuff that is on Reddit forums? What are you hearing? Yeah, yeah. You know, it's a little bit of a hunch in the sense of I don't think anyone has come out and confessed that they're insider trading.

22:53What we can see is a pattern of betting activity that looks suspiciously good. It looks like someone seemed to have knowledge in advance of some event, some announcement that a company was going to make. Give us an example. Give us an example. For example, there was an account that made about a million dollars betting over the course of a day on what the top searches would be in Google's 2025 search data, which they announced at the end of the year. And this person bet correctly on 22 out of the 23 questions. Now, these are questions with a lot of possible answers and a lot of uncertainty around them.

23:29So this was a track record that looked sort of too good to be true. Like if you were just betting by chance with the amount of knowledge that a normal person has, you'd be very unlikely to do this well. So that raised some red flags. Other sort of red flags are when people put a lot of money into a market all at once, and then they tend to be very successful. They tend to put money in right before the actual announcement happens, as if someone had tipped them off right before the announcement went out. But it can be very successful betting on the same company or cluster of companies over and over again.

24:03So have regulators or has the company clamped down on any of this, if in fact it's true? Yeah. So regulators have been somewhat silent on the topic. And as a result, the burden has fallen to the companies to figure out what to do about this. So in terms of the regulators, these markets are not securities. So the SEC, which is often the one that we think of when we hear about cases of insider trading, is not really the one that's responsible in these cases. The CFTC, which does regulate Calci and soon will regulate a U.S. entity for Polymarket, does do some amount of work on insider trading. And similarly, you could imagine the DOJ getting involved in certain cases.

24:46But for federal agencies to pursue cases like this, you would have to have an administration that was making them feel very emboldened. This is the way people are putting it to me. You'd have to have an environment where the government was feeling creative and feeling like it did want to broaden the law and set new precedents. And we haven't really seen that in the past year. Some people are telling me they think it's unlikely we'll see that in the next few years. So it remains kind of a regulatory gray area. So it falls to the companies, meaning Calci, Polymarket, to enforce surveillance, monitoring for insider trading on their platforms.

25:23So if I'm reading your prediction correctly about these prediction markets, it's that nothing is really going to change, at least in the near future, about this. And there will just continue to be these suspiciously successful trades, I guess. I think we'll see some of it. uh calci in particular does sort of seek out insider traders they have automated systems to monitor uh the you know sort of pattern of behavior of its traders it also relies on other traders to kind of tattletale and point out this kind of suspicious activity and then they investigate a handful of accounts every quarter this is what their compliance people are telling me is they do uh sort of have actual interviews with traders that seem like they're they might be insiders and in the event that someone does seem to be insider trading they can either suspend the account temporarily or permanently and even refer them to the authorities who might be the cftc in this case and did the companies tell you that they have referred anyone to the authorities or or found they yeah right well i don't know i i this is one of the stories that it's just you know it's hard to know how fast things are going to move but it's certainly one that is important to bring to our attention.

26:34And so it was a great piece. I'll say also, you know, some people defend insider trading on prediction markets. I think that's another thing that makes it a little different from the typical territory with securities in the stock market. Some people say, well, the purpose of prediction markets is to give the public a sense of what's going on. If insiders make those markets more accurate at predicting the future, so much the better. That's a public service. And some prediction markets go so far to encourage insiders that, you know, I can make a prediction market, say on manifold, which uses play money, not real money, but I can make a prediction market about what I'm going to have for dinner tonight.

27:07Obviously, I'm an insider in that market. And not only do I have knowledge about what's going to happen, I can make it happen. And I can bet in my own market. But nonetheless, it seems like manifold markets are like pretty. Well, yeah, but that seems like a bit of a slippery slope, because you can make the same argument for stocks and saying if you have a big, you know, of somebody who has inside knowledge of a stock that's about to go south, they're doing a public service. I don't know. This seems like... Absolutely. And so then the legal theory of fraud is not that you're harming the public by insider trading.

27:39It's often that you're harming the company. You're taking information that wasn't yours to profit off of, confidential information, and then you're using it for your own benefit. And that's sort of where the damages come into play. And some legal theories of fraud, Similarly, in prediction markets, that's why we're seeing companies increasingly tell their employees, you are not allowed to insider trade in prediction. Right, right. Okay, let's get quickly to a newsletter that you wrote today in our AI Agenda franchise. It was about AI and alien hunters. Talk a little bit about how you came across this idea and why you decided to write about it.