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.
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.
Arvind Krishna, CEO of IBM, arrives for the Inaugural AI Insight Forum in Russell Building on Capitol Hill, on Wednesday, September 13, 2023.
Tom Williams | Cq-roll Call, Inc. | Getty Images
IBM said Tuesday that it will lay off a small percentage of its employees in the current quarter.
“In the fourth quarter we are executing an action that will impact a low single-digit percentage of our global workforce,” a spokesperson told CNBC. “While this may impact some U.S.-based roles, we anticipate that our U.S. employment will remain flat year over year.”
IBM employed 270,000 people at the end of 2024, according to its latest annual report. A 1% cut to headcount would represent the loss of 2,700 jobs.
Other technology companies have been slimming down lately, with executives looking for ways to improve productivity by increasing reliance on artificial intelligence tools.
On Oct. 22, IBM delivered stronger earnings than expected, thanks to a 10% jump in revenue from software, meeting consensus.
CEO Arvind Krishna has helped IBM expand its revenue base since he replaced Ginni Rometty in 2020.
The hardware, software and services provider said goodbye to some marketing and communications staff members in March 2024.
AI agents took over the work of about 200 people in human resources, leading the company to bring on more salespeople and software developers, Krishna told The Wall Street Journal in May.
Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX, arrives at court as lawyers push to persuade the judge overseeing his fraud case not to jail him ahead of trial, at a courthouse in New York, August 11, 2023.
Eduardo Munoz | Reuters
The judges in a federal appeals court in New York on Tuesday were skeptical of arguments by a lawyer for Sam Bankman-Fried that his conviction for a multi-billion-dollar fraud related to his cryptocurrency exchange FTX and an associated hedge fund should be tossed out.
Bankman-Fried’s attorney, Alexandra Shapiro, was almost immediately and then repeatedly interrupted by the three-judge panel on the 2nd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals as she tried to make her case that SBF deserved a new trial because the first one was “fundamentally unfair.”
“From my reading of the record, [there was] very substantial evidence of guilt,” Judge Barringon Parker told Shapiro.
“Are you seriously suggesting to us that if your client had been able to testify about the role that attorneys played in preparing these various documents, the not-guilty verdicts would have rolled in?” Parker asked, as Bankman-Fried’s parents looked on from the courtroom gallery.
Bankman-Fried, 33, was convicted in November 2023 of seven criminal counts for fraud against customers of FTX and lenders to the hedge fund Alameda Research. He is serving a 25-year prison sentence.
Defense lawyer Alexandra Shapiro makes oral arguments before United States Circuit Judges for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit Barington D. Parker Jr., Eunice C. Lee and Maria Araujo Kahn during former cryptocurrency executive Sam Bankman-Fried’s appeal of his fraud conviction in New York City, U.S., November 4, 2025 in a courtroom sketch.
Jane Rosenberg | Reuters
Shapiro argued that rulings by the trial judge, Lewis Kaplan of U.S. District Court in Manhattan, which included limiting what SBF could testify about, unfairly favored prosecutors.
That “allowed the prosecution to present this morally compelling tale, but prevented the defense from showing that the story wasn’t true,” she said.
“The defense was cut off at the knees by the judge’s rulings,” Shapiro told the panel.
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She said prosecutors were allowed to falsely argue at trial that customers and lenders had lost billions of dollars, and would never be able to recover that money.
In reality, she said, it was her understanding that 98% of all FTX creditors have received 120% of their investments plus interest, and that the FTX estate has already paid $8 billion to creditors and another $1 billion in legal fees. She added that there is another $8 billion left to cover $2 billion in remaining claims.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Thane Rehn spent the bulk of his time during the hearing answering questions by the judge over how an $11 billion forfeiture against SBF is structured, and what will happen to that forfeiture order if all victims are made whole before the entire amount is spent.
OpenAI on Tuesday launched its Sora app of AI-generated videos for Android devices.
The artificial intelligence company first launched Sora for Apple devices in September. The announcement on Tuesday brings the popular AI app to the Google Play app store for users in the U.S., Canada, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam.
Sora reportedly hit 1 million downloads less than five days after its debut, and it topped Apple’s App Store for nearly three weeks. Sora currently holds the no. 5 spot on Apple’s list of the top free apps, behind Google’s Gemini at no. 4 and ChatGP, which is also made by OpenAI, in the top spot.
OpenAI is working on making the app available in Europe, according to a post on X from Bill Peebles, head of Sora at OpenAI.
The app allows users to create AI-generated videos through written prompts, then post those videos onto a shared feed, similar to that of TikTok. Although initially rolled out as an invite-only platform, Sora is now available to anyone for a limited time, according to an OpenAI post on X.