Databricks is raising $4 billion in a funding round that would value the data analytics software company at $134 billion, the company announced Tuesday.

The valuation is a 34% jump from the funding round announced in August, which valued the company at $100 billion. At the time, Databricks became one of a handful of private companies to surpass a $100 billion valuation, after SpaceX, ByteDance and OpenAI.

Databricks said it plans to use the capital to support customer app building as artificial intelligence accelerates development.

The company said it topped a $4.8 billion revenue run-rate during the third quarter and is growing 55% year-over-year. That figure is also up from the $4 billion revenue run-rate announced earlier this year.

Databricks is among a growing list of companies that have opted to stay private for longer as private markets offer more funding opportunities.

Insight Partners, Fidelity Management & Research Company and JPMorgan Asset Management led the round, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz.

Databricks was founded in 2013 in San Francisco and ranked third on CNBC’s 2025 Disruptor 50 list.

Robotaxis felt like science fiction just a decade ago, but this year, autonomous vehicles became a commonplace option for paying passengers across big cities in the U.S. and parts of Asia.

Alphabet-owned Waymo kept expanding and dominates the robotaxi market in the U.S., though rivals Tesla and Amazon-owned Zoox also launched the first versions of their services in 2025. Meanwhile, Baidu-owned Apollo Go dominated in China.

Some parents are now sending teens to schools and activities in Waymos, and women often praise the privacy of these AVs versus rides with strangers who drive for ride-hailing and traditional taxi services.

Waymo, in particular, has been so successful in its commercial expansion that Tesla CEO Elon Musk acknowledged his rival’s achievements after previously criticizing the Google sister company. At Tesla’s annual meeting on Nov. 6, Musk thanked Waymo for “paving the path here” when it comes to working out the regulatory approvals that allow robotaxi services to do business across much of the U.S.

But driverless transportation has a long way to go before it becomes more mainstream.

A survey by the American Automobile Association in early 2025 showed that 66% of drivers in the U.S. felt fearful and 25% felt uncertain about autonomous vehicles, reflecting the same consumer skepticism that AAA tracked with the survey in 2024.

There have been rampant complaints about noise, congestion and the sometimes erratic driving behavior of robotaxis, along with economic concerns about the impact of AVs on travel and transportation workers. However, known harmful collisions caused by AVs have been relatively few so far, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, or NHTSA.

Robotaxi fares are currently higher than alternatives today, according to Obi, which tracks ride-hail pricing data and compared Waymo to human-driven Uber and Lyft rides.

Both safety records and costs per ride could change as AV fleets grow from hundreds to thousands of vehicles.

With 2026 just around the corner, here’s how the robotaxi market stands today.

Furthest along in the robotaxi race is Waymo, which now serves rides to the public in five markets, up from three at the end of 2024. Looking ahead, the company is focused on “scaling up pretty aggressively,” Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said.

“Because this involves the physical world, the scale up will take a bit of time, but I think in the ’27-’28 time frame, I think that Waymo will be meaningful in our financials,” Pichai told employees at an all-hands meeting in November, according to audio obtained by CNBC. “I’m pretty excited about what’s ahead there.”

Waymo’s robotaxi service currently operates in the Austin, San Francisco Bay Area, Phoenix, Atlanta and Los Angeles markets. Earlier this month, CNBC reported that Waymo crossed an estimated 450,000 weekly paid rides, and the company in December said it had served 14 million trips in 2025, putting it on pace to end the year at more than 20 million trips total since launching in 2020.

Besides market expansion, Waymo in 2025 also hit key milestones.

In July, the company announced it would be expanding its age range for eligible riders, offering accounts to teens ages 14 to 17, starting in Phoenix. And in November, Waymo began taking customers on freeway routes in the San Francisco, Phoenix and Los Angeles markets, with plans to gradually extend freeway trips to more riders and locations over time.

In recent weeks, the company made a flurry of announcements to further expand its territory in 2026. Waymo is now either operating its robotaxis, planning to launch service or starting to test its vehicles in 26 markets, in the U.S. and abroad.

In 2026, Waymo plans to open service in Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Las Vegas, Miami, Nashville, Orlando, San Antonio, San Diego and Washington, D.C. The company also announced plans to launch its service in London in 2026, which will mark Waymo’s first overseas service region.

Additionally, the company has begun testing vehicles in New York and Tokyo, two of the most dense cities in which Waymo has started driving. The company hasn’t yet specified service launch timelines for those markets. 

Waymo is also eyeing expansion northward. The company has been testing its technology to ensure it can “navigate harsher weather conditions,” Waymo spokesperson Ethan Teicher said. Markets like Denver and Detroit will let Alphabet see how its robotaxis fare against elements like freezing temperatures, blinding snow and icy roads.

And in November, the company hired a new finance chief as it looks toward its next phase, which could include seeking additional outside investment.

Alphabet doesn’t break out Waymo’s financials, but the company’s “Other Bets” segment that includes the robotaxi division reported revenue of $344 million for the third quarter, down from $388 million the year prior. Losses grew from $1.12 billion last year in the third quarter to $1.43 billion in the same period this year.

But as it looks ahead, Waymo faces challenges.

Its rivals are making progress, and the company is beginning to contend with pushback from communities as some say the robotaxis are beginning to drive more aggressively.

In San Francisco, a Waymo hit and killed a locally-known bodega cat in October, and another vehicle hit a small, unleashed dog in November. In Los Angeles, a Waymo drove through an active police standoff earlier this month.

Waymo also issued a software recall for its vehicles after Texas officials said the robotaxis illegally passed school buses at least 19 times since the start of the school year, according to a Reuters report this month.

The company issued the recall as part of its efforts to hold itself to the highest safety standards, Waymo’s safety chief Mauricio Peña said in a statement.

“We will continue analyzing our vehicles’ performance and making necessary fixes as part of our commitment to continuous improvement,” he said.

Additionally, Waymo said that safety guides every development decision it makes, and its vehicles are designed to be safely assertive.

Founded in 2014 and acquired by Amazon for $1.3 billion in 2020, Zoox has set itself apart with its bespoke, toaster-shaped vehicles that have no steering wheel, mirrors or pedals and are equipped with “carriage-style,” inward-facing seats.

The company notched a milestone in September when it began offering public rides around the Las Vegas Strip before launching rides to select users in certain San Francisco neighborhoods in November. Currently, Zoox is dropping riders off at specific destinations in Las Vegas, but in San Francisco, it operates on a “point-to-point” basis more akin to Uber and Lyft.

For now, rides in Zoox’s electric shuttles are free.

That’s because the company still needs federal regulators to give it the green light to operate a paid service. The NHTSA granted Zoox an exemption in August that enables the company to demonstrate its purpose-built robotaxis on public roads, but it must obtain a separate exemption for commercial deployment.

Zoox is planning to begin charging for rides in San Francisco and Las Vegas in 2026, pending regulatory approvals, co-founder Jesse Levinson told Fortune earlier this month.

More markets are also expected in 2026. Zoox plans to gradually expand its service area in San Francisco, and the company operates a fleet of retrofitted Toyota Highlander SUVs in Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, Miami, Seattle and Washington, D.C. It’s also preparing to begin testing its boxy robotaxis in Austin and Miami, Zoox spokesperson Marisa Wiggam said. 

But Zoox’s rollout hasn’t been without hiccups.

The company issued a software recall in March for some of its test fleet to resolve a phantom braking issue that prompted a NHTSA investigation. Zoox also issued two voluntary software recalls in May after its robotaxi collided with an e-scooter rider in San Francisco and one of its vehicles was involved in a crash with a passenger car in Las Vegas. 

The Amazon subsidiary has deployed a fleet of 50 robotaxis between San Francisco and Las Vegas, but Zoox is preparing to scale up. In June, the company opened a 220,000-square-foot factory in the San Francisco Bay Area, where it aims to produce 10,000 vehicles a year once it’s fully operational. 

At that time, the company also launched a Tesla Robotaxi pilot service in Austin and, soon after, a service in the San Francisco Bay Area called its “full self-driving” or FSD (Supervised) Rideshare.

All of Tesla’s vehicles for hire are hailed through its Robotaxi app. By September, Tesla made that app widely available. It also locked in a permit for AV testing in Nevada, and obtained a permit to operate a ride-hail service in Arizona, after previously securing permission to test self-driving cars there with a human safety driver on board.

The company has stirred controversy, and regulatory scrutiny, by recruiting test drivers in cities where it does not have permits to conduct any driverless operations — most notably New York, CNBC first reported in August.

In Tesla’s third-quarter earnings call in late October, Musk said the company expected to be operating a robotaxi service in Nevada, Florida and Arizona by the end of the year. That had not happened as of mid-December.

Tesla’s Robotaxi vehicles included human safety monitors on board as of mid-December. Those supervisors are supposed to be ready to take over steering or braking at any time.

But one California rider posted a video on Reddit in November showing a Tesla rideshare monitor asleep at the wheel. The NHTSA and California Public Utilities Commission told CNBC they were aware of the incident. CPUC said it was in touch with Tesla about it.

It’s unclear when Tesla will be able to run its ride-hail services without human supervisors. But on Sunday, Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla’s vice president of AI software, shared a post on X that said one of the company’s Model Y robotaxis was spotted driving on public roads in Austin without any people on board.

“Testing is underway with no occupants in the car,” Musk posted on Sunday.

Tesla did not respond to a request for comment.

In California, the company has yet to obtain the permits needed to run a commercial robotaxi service, according to the CPUC and the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles.

While all AV companies face uphill battles to prove the safety of their systems, Tesla’s driverless tech is drawing closer scrutiny. That’s in part because of the dozens of fatal collisions tied to its advanced driver assistance systems, currently marketed as Autopilot and FSD (Supervised) in the U.S., according to TeslaDeaths.com which tracks those incidents.

After launching its pilot service in Austin in late June, Tesla reported seven collisions involving its 2026 Model Y vehicles through Oct. 15 to NHTSA. Those vehicles were equipped with Tesla’s newer ADS, or “automated driving systems,” which are not yet widely available, and those collisions weren’t severe, according to the NHTSA data.

Musk in October said Tesla would be “paranoid about deployment because obviously even one incident will be front-page headline news.” 

In November, Musk posted on X that Tesla would double its fleet of vehicles in the Austin area this month. That would put the fleet at 60 vehicles by year’s end, which is significantly less than an earlier stated goal of 500 robotaxis.

Still, Tesla bulls are betting that the automaker will evolve its cars and ride-hailing operations into fully driverless robotaxis in the year ahead, citing the company’s vast troves of data gathered from customers’ cars and updates to the FSD (Supervised) system in the past year.

And consumer interest in Tesla’s service is growing.

Launched in September, the Tesla Robotaxi-branded app has been installed 529,000 times as of Dec. 12, with an average of 2,790 downloads per day over the last 30 days, according to Apptopia. By comparison, Waymo’s app averaged 24,831 downloads per day over the same time frame, Apptopia said.

Search giant Baidu ramped up its Apollo Go robotaxi this year, saying in October that it had surpassed 250,000 weekly driverless rides, which is on par with where Waymo was in April.

Apollo Go operates robotaxis in several major Chinese cities, including the suburbs of the capital city Beijing and the entire city of Wuhan.

It’s also working to expand to Abu Dhabi and Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, Guangzhou in China, Hong Kong and Switzerland. In August, the company announced a partnership with Lyft to bring its robotaxis to the U.K. and Germany in 2026.

In November, Apollo Go disclosed in a third-quarter update that it had received 17 million robotaxi ride orders and that its cars had driven 240 million kilometers (149 million miles), including 140 million fully driverless miles through September.

Meanwhile, Pony.ai and WeRide, both based in Guangzhou and listed in the U.S., have also rolled out service. 

In 2025, Pony.ai got a permit to operate throughout Shenzhen, known as China’s Silicon Valley, and also operated a driverless robotaxi service in the suburbs of Beijing.

WeRide has focused more on ramping up overseas. The company began offering a robotaxi service in Abu Dhabi in November in partnership with Uber.

In October, WeRide and Uber also began offering robotaxi rides with human supervisors on board in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and the companies in May said that they planned to bring robotaxi service to several more cities, including in Europe, over the next five years.

On its own, WeRide offers robotaxi service in the Beijing and Guangzhou markets, the company told CNBC in a statement.

WeRide said its AVs are also deployed in Leuven, Belgium, and that it has obtained driverless permits for markets in France, Singapore, Switzerland and the U.S. The company said it currently has a fleet of 1,600 autonomous vehicles, which also include self-driving buses and autonomous street sweepers.

— CNBC’s Evelyn Cheng contributed reporting

This is CNBC’s Morning Squawk newsletter. Subscribe here to receive future editions in your inbox.

Here are five key things investors need to know to start the trading day:

• Economists polled by Dow Jones are expecting this morning’s report to show that the U.S. added 45,000 jobs in November and that the unemployment rate ticked up to 4.5%.
• Fed Chair Jerome Powell warned in his news conference last week there has been a “systematic overcount” of jobs numbers recently, which could lead to large revisions.
• Meanwhile, the market is increasingly unsure of who will succeed Powell. Sources familiar with the matter told CNBC’s Steve Liesman that National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett’s candidacy has received pushback from people close to President Donald Trump.
• Traders are heading into this morning’s jobs report on their back foot. The three major indexes finished yesterday’s session in the red, once again dragged lower by artificial intelligence stocks as financing fears lingered.
• Jobs data is sharing the spotlight this week. The November consumer price index is due out on Thursday after also being held up by the government shutdown.
• Follow live markets updates here.

Ford’s shift away from all-electric vehicles is costing it $19.5 billion in special items, the automaker said yesterday. Shares rose nearly 2% in extended trading.

The charges, most of which Ford expects in the fourth quarter, are related to Ford’s new focus on hybrid vehicles and its decision to cancel a generation of all-electric trucks in favor of smaller and more affordable EVs. As CNBC’s Michael Wayland notes, the move comes as the broader EV industry grapples with a sales slump following the end of federal tax credits for EV buyers in September.

Ford CEO Jim Farley told CNBC’s “Closing Bell Overtime” yesterday that the carmaker is “following customers to where the market is.” For high-end EVs in particular, Farley said that they “just weren’t selling.”

Revenue from the new tariffs imposed by Trump this year has surpassed $200 billion, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency said yesterday.

Trump’s broad and steep duties have reshaped global trade this year, but their fate hangs in the balance as the Supreme Court weighs their legality. If the court rules against the White House, it could require refunds for companies that have already paid the tariffs.

Despite the milestone, tariff revenue recently pulled back. Collections fell to $30.75 billion in November from above $31 billion in the prior month — the first decline since Trump announced his sweeping new tariffs in April.

Consumers are still feeling doom and gloom about the economy. But as CNBC’s Gabrielle Fonrouge and Melissa Repko report, that isn’t stopping them from spending.

Even as a key consumer sentiment gauge sits near record lows, data shows that the highest number of Americans shopped in the five-day period from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday in at least nine years. Retailers ranging from Costco to Best Buy have also said they’ve had positive starts to the all-important holiday shopping period.

There are still signs that the economic outlook is weighing on consumption habits. Namely, strength in value-oriented retailers like Walmart and T.J. Maxx signal shoppers’ increased attention to prices.

A decade ago, robotaxis were still being written off as the work of science fiction. Today, these driverless cars have become commonplace across America, from the Las Vegas Strip to school drop-off lines in Phoenix.

Alphabet-owned Waymo – the industry leader – is now operating, testing or planning to launch service in 26 markets around the world. Meanwhile, Amazon-owned Zoox and Tesla launched the first iterations of their services this year. Tesla shares surged to a new 2025 high yesterday after CEO Elon Musk confirmed that driverless robotaxi tests were happening in Austin.

There are still obstacles on the road to becoming more mainstream, whether it’s complaints around noise and congestion, consumer concerns about safety or higher prices than traditional rideshare platforms.

Baron Capital founder Ron Baron joined CNBC’s “ETF Edge” yesterday to discuss his firm’s new exchange-traded funds and SpaceX investment.

— CNBC’s Sean Conlon, Sarah Min, John Melloy, Steve Liesman, Michael Wayland, Lori Ann LaRocco, Gabrielle Fonrouge, Lora Kolodny, Jennifer Elias, Annie Palmer and Yun Li contributed to this report. Josephine Rozzelle edited this edition.