Databricks closed a $5 billion funding round at a $190 billion valuation, co-founder and CEO Ali Ghodsi confirmed Thursday, capping a fundraise that started as a $1 billion plan and ballooned into $15 billion of inbound investor interest. Coatue led the round, joined by Blackstone, MGX, T. Rowe Price accounts, and new backer Sixth Street Growth. About two dozen VCs were named as participants.
The size of the raise was not the original plan. Ghodsi said the round was meant to be a quiet $1 billion when a leaked report during Databricks's June conference redirected the entire process.
“We wanted to raise $1 billion, but then The Information printed this article saying that Databricks is doing a big fundraise. They did that in the middle of our conference. We were heads down with our conference, and we were not actually at all focused on fundraising.”— Ali Ghodsi, Databricks co-founder and CEO
The leak turned the story into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Databricks first acknowledged the deal in a July press release pegging the valuation at $188 billion without disclosing the amount raised. Thursday's confirmation added the $5 billion figure and pushed the mark up another $2 billion.
Key facts
- 01Databricks closed a $5B round at a $190B valuation, up from the $188B mark disclosed in July.
- 02The company set out to raise $1B but fielded $15B of investor interest from a select group.
- 03Revenue hit a $7B annualized run rate, growing 80%, with the core data warehouse at $1.5B and growing 100% YoY.
- 04Lakebase, the agent database launched in June 2025, has already reached a $100M revenue run rate.
- 05Databricks has now raised $20B over the past 20 months and remains cash-flow positive.
The bidding got out of hand quickly, and Ghodsi described the inbound demand as running roughly 15 times ahead of what the company had actually set out to raise.
“The interest level was just insane. Just from this select group of investors that we looked at, there was $15 billion of interest.”— Ali Ghodsi, Databricks co-founder and CEO
Facing $15 billion of demand against a $1 billion target, Databricks chose to issue more stock rather than turn away long-standing backers — a familiar late-stage calculation, but a particularly stark one at this scale. Sixth Street Growth, founded by former Goldman Sachs chief investment officer Alan Waxman, came in as the sole new name in a lineup dominated by existing supporters.
The financials explain the appetite. Ghodsi said Databricks is running at $7 billion of annualized revenue, growing 80%, and is cash-flow positive. The core cloud data warehouse alone accounts for $1.5 billion of that run rate and is still growing 100% year-over-year. Lakebase, the Postgres-based database for AI agents that launched in June 2025, has already reached a $100 million revenue run rate. Genie, the company's on-the-fly business-analysis chatbot, is what Ghodsi called insanely popular.
The obvious question is why a cash-flow-positive company with $7 billion of run rate needs another $5 billion in the bank, on top of the $20 billion it has raised over the past 20 months.
“AI research is very expensive.”— Ali Ghodsi, Databricks co-founder and CEO
The answer is the AI cost curve. Databricks has multibillion-dollar commitments with all three major hyperscalers and staffs an AI research team of about 100 people — one of the most competitively priced hiring pools in the industry. It is also acquiring aggressively. This week Databricks bought Electric, maker of the lightweight PGlite Postgres database that lets agents spin up their own data stores; in June it acquired AI security firm Panther; in March it picked up two more startups.
The IPO question keeps lingering. Ghodsi told CNBC he still wants to take Databricks public one day, an eventual liquidity path his roster of investors will require. But at a $190 billion private valuation with $15 billion of on-demand interest, the pressure to file is negligible. Staying private lets Databricks spend on AI research and M&A without the quarterly scrutiny that has punished public AI-heavy names.
The counterweight is the valuation itself. At $190 billion on a $7 billion run rate, Databricks is trading at roughly 27 times revenue in private markets — a multiple that assumes the 80% growth rate holds and that Lakebase and Genie scale into meaningful lines. Snowflake, the closest public comparable, trades at a fraction of that multiple. Whether the private mark holds through an eventual IPO depends on how quickly the AI product suite catches up to the core warehouse business.
Databricks is now the clearest test case for a specific thesis: that the winners of the AI infrastructure buildout will be the companies that already own enterprise data, not the model labs training on it. A $190 billion valuation, $7 billion of run rate, and $20 billion raised in under two years suggest the private market is convinced. The public market will get its turn eventually — Ghodsi is in no hurry to hand it the chance.
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