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Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and CEO of Databricks.

Databricks

As some high-valued tech startups look to the long-dormant IPO market for their next funding round, Databricks is still finding investors that are happy to keep the company private, at least for now.

Databricks, which sells data analytics software, said Thursday that it raised more than $500 million in fresh capital at a $43 billion valuation.

Founded in 2013 and based in San Francisco, Databricks last announced funding during the boom market of 2021, at a $38 billion valuation. Since then, cloud software stocks have plummeted, with rival Snowflake losing 45% of its value. However, unlike fellow software IPO candidates Canva and Stripe, Databricks has managed to maintain its share price.

In the latest round, shares were sold at $73.50 a piece, roughly equal to where they were priced in 2021. The $5 billion increase in valuation is the result of new shares that CEO Ali Ghodsi said have gone to the 3,500 employees the company has hired in the past two years, as well as to investors. Headcount now sits at around 6,000.

While high interest rates and economic concerns continue to weigh on the tech market, particularly on companies that are burning cash, Databricks is capitalizing on a surge of momentum in artificial intelligence. In July, Databricks acquired MosaicML, a startup with software for efficiently running large language models that can spit out natural-sounding text, for $1.3 billion.

Nvidia is a new investor in Databricks, a notable addition as the chipmaker has been pouring cash into a host of AI infrastructure startups. Hugging Face, Cohere and CoreWeave are a few of the companies that Nvidia has backed at multibillion-dollar valuations.

Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman: AI will become a million times what 'search' is

Ghodsi said that he started talking to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang “a while back,” and that a strategic tie-up has become more important with both companies going deeper into AI. Databricks spends a lot of money on Nvidia’s graphics processing units, largely through various public clouds, and even more now that his company owns Mosaic. He added that Nvidia and Mosaic had been in talks about a partnership before the acquisition.

“It made sense to partner more closely,” Ghodsi said. “At the core, we’re in complementary markets.”

Equally notable is the participation of Capital One’s venture arm as an investor for the first time. That’s because the bank is Snowflake’s largest customer. Snowflake finance chief Mike Scarpelli said at an investor event in August 2022 that Capital One was spending almost $50 million annually with Snowflake, and in November he said that the firm is its top customer and that it’s “taken them 5.3 years to get where we are now.”

Capital One is also a Databricks customer and uses the technology partly for fraud detection, according to a 2021 blog post.

Existing investor T. Rowe Price led Databricks’ latest round, and was joined by Andreessen Horowitz, Baillie Gifford, Fidelity, Morgan Stanley’s Counterpoint Global and Tiger Global, among others.

Ghodsi said that when the company started talking to investors about a potential financing round a couple of months ago, his “original guidance was no more than $100 million.” That number ultimately swelled fivefold as more investors wanted to join, he said.

As for a potential initial public offering, Ghodsi said that’s still on the road map, and that this funding doesn’t change the company’s plans. He didn’t say when an IPO might happen.

Databricks will get to see how much demand there is for new tech opportunities in the coming weeks. Chip designer Arm is returning to the public market on Thursday after getting taken private in 2016. Grocery delivery company Instacart and software vendor Klaviyo filed their prospectuses last month. There hasn’t been a notable venture-backed tech IPO in the U.S. since late 2021.

Many enterprise software makers have been trying to limit spending while growth rates slow because the uncertain economy has led big customers to reduce their purchasing. Databricks has stayed in growth mode and hasn’t announced any layoffs.

Ghodsi said much of the cost cutting he’s pursued was in his company’s use of technology, particularly software subscriptions.

“We spent $30 million on 300 pieces of SaaS software,” Ghodsi said, referring to software as a service. “I said, ‘Let’s halve that.'”

In the quarter that ended in July, Databricks said it reached a $1.5 billion annual revenue run rate, with sales growing 50% year over year. Snowflake, whose shares debuted on the New York Stock Exchange in 2020, reported 36% growth in the latest quarter to $674 million in revenue.

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Apple’s 3-day loss in market cap swells to almost $640 billion

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Apple's 3-day loss in market cap swells to almost 0 billion

(L-R) Apple CEO Tim Cook, Vivek Ramaswamy and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem attend the inauguration ceremony before Donald Trump is sworn in as the 47th U.S. President in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 20, 2025.

Saul Loeb | Afp | Getty Images

While the stock market broadly fared better on Monday than in the prior two trading days, Apple got hammered once again, losing 3.7%, as concerns mounted that the company will take a major hit from President Donald Trump’s tariffs.

The sell-off brings Apple’s three-day rout to 19%, a downdraft that has wiped out $638 billion in market cap.

Apple is one of the most exposed companies to a trade war, analyst say, due largely to its reliance on China, which is facing 54% tariffs. Although Apple has production in India, Vietnam and Thailand, those countries also face increased tariffs as part of Trump’s sweeping plan.

Among tech’s megacap companies, Apple is having the roughest stretch. On Monday, the only stocks to drop in that group of seven were Apple, Microsoft and Tesla.

The Nasdaq finished almost barely up on Monday after plummeting 10% last week, its worst performance in more than five years.

Analysts say Apple will likely either need to raise prices or eat additional tariff costs when the new duties come into effect. UBS analysts estimated on Monday that Apple’s highest-end iPhone could rise in price by about $350, or around 30%, from its current price of $1,199.

Barclays analyst Tim Long wrote that he expects Apple to raise prices, or the company could suffer as much as a 15% cut to earnings per share. Apple may also be able to rearrange its supply chain so that imports to the U.S. come from other countries with lower tariffs.

Apple declined to comment on the tariffs.

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Apple’s highest-end iPhone could see $350 price hike in U.S. on Trump tariffs, analyst predicts

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Apple's highest-end iPhone could see 0 price hike in U.S. on Trump tariffs, analyst predicts

A customer checks Apple’s latest iPhone 16 Plus (right) and Apple’s latest iPhone 16 Pro Max (left) series displayed for sale at Master Arts Shop in Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir, on Sept. 26, 2024.

Firdous Nazir | Nurphoto | Getty Images

President Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariffs could lead Apple to raise the price of the iPhone 16 Pro Max by as much as $350 in the U.S., UBS analysts estimated Monday.

The iPhone 16 Pro Max is Apple’s highest-end iPhone on the market, and currently retails for $1,199. UBS is predicting a nearly 30% increase in retail price for units that were manufactured in China.

Apple’s $999 phone, the iPhone 16 Pro, could see a smaller $120 price increase, if the company has it manufactured in India, the UBS analysts wrote.

Shares of Apple have plummeted 20% over the past three trading days, wiping out nearly $640 billion in market cap, on concern that Trump’s tariffs will force the company to raise prices just as consumers are losing buying power.

“Based on the checks we have done at a company level, there is a lot of uncertainty about how the increased cost sharing will be done with suppliers, the extent to which costs can be passed on to end-customers, and the duration of tariffs,” UBS analyst Sundeep Gantori wrote in the note.

Apple, which does the majority of its manufacturing in China, is one of the most exposed companies to a trade war. China has a potential incoming 54% tariff rate — before new increases were proposed Monday. Smaller tariffs were also placed on secondary production locations, such as India, Vietnam and Thailand.

JPMorgan Chase analysts predicted last week that Apple could raise its prices 6% across the world to offset the U.S. tariffs. Barclays analyst Tim Long wrote that he expects Apple to raise prices, or it could suffer as much as a 15% cut to earnings per share.

If Apple were to relocate iPhone production to the U.S. — a move that most supply chain experts say is impossible — Wedbush’s Dan Ives predicts an iPhone could cost $3,500.

Morgan Stanley analysts on Friday said Apple could absorb additional tariff costs of about $34 billion annually. They wrote that although Apple has diversified its production in recent years to additional countries — so-called friendshoring — those countries could also end up with tariffs, reducing Apple’s flexibility.

After last week’s “reciprocal tariff announcement, there becomes very little differentiation in friend shoring vs. manufacturing in China — if the product is not made in the US, it will be subject to a hefty import tariff,” Morgan Stanley wrote.

Last week, the firm estimated that Apple may raise its prices across its product lines in the U.S. by 17% to 18%. Apple could also get exemptions from the U.S. government for its products.

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Elon Musk’s brother slams Trump tariffs, calls them ‘permanent tax on the American consumer’

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Elon Musk's brother slams Trump tariffs, calls them 'permanent tax on the American consumer'

Kimbal Musk, co-founder of The Kitchen Community, speaks during the annual Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, California, May 3, 2016.

Patrick T. Fallon  | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Elon Musk’s younger brother, Kimbal, took to the social network X on Monday to lambaste President Donald Trump’s tariffs, calling them a “structural, permanent tax on the American consumer.” He also said Trump appears to be the “most high tax American President in generations.”

“Even if he is successful in bringing jobs on shore through the tariff tax, prices will remain high and the tax on consumption will remain the form of higher prices because we are simply not as good at making things,” Kimbal Musk wrote on X, one of the companies in his brother’s extensive portfolio.

The younger Musk owns a restaurant chain called The Kitchen, is a board member at Tesla and a former director at SpaceX and Chipotle. He has also co-founded and invested in other food and tech startups, including Square Roots, an indoor farming company, and Nova Sky Stories, a creator of drone light shows that he bought from Intel.

Elon Musk is a top advisor to Trump, overseeing the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, an effort to drastically cut federal spending, largely through layoffs, and consolidate or eliminate agencies and regulations. However, his relationship with some key figures in the Trump administration has been showing signs of strain in recent days as the president’s sweeping tariffs have led to a dramatic selloff in stocks, including for Tesla, which is down 42% this year and just wrapped up its worst quarter since 2022.

Over the weekend, Elon Musk took aim at Trump trade advisor Peter Navarro, disparaging his qualifications in a post on X.

“A PhD in Econ from Harvard is a bad thing, not a good thing,” Musk wrote, after Navarro told CNN on Saturday that “The market will find a bottom” and that the Dow will “hit 50,000 during Trump’s term.” It’s currently at about 38,200.

Musk also said that Navarro hasn’t built “sh—.” Navarro told CNBC on Monday that Musk is “not a car manufacturer” but rather a “car assembler,” dependent on parts from Japan, China and Taiwan.

Tesla was seeking a more moderate approach to trade and tariffs in a recent letter to the U.S. Trade Representative.

According to Federal Election Commission filings, Kimbal Musk this year has contributed funds to the Libertarian National Committee and Libertarian Party of Connecticut. In 2024, while his brother became the biggest financial backer and promoter of Trump, Kimbal donated to Unite America PAC, a group that markets itself as a “philanthropic venture fund that invests in nonpartisan election reform to foster a more representative and functional government.”

A representative for Kimbal Musk didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

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