Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and CEO of Databricks, speaks at a press conference at Databricks’ Data and AI Summit in San Francisco on June 12, 2024.
Jordan Novet | CNBC
Databricks, the data analytics software vendor that’s among the most richly valued private U.S. tech companies, told investors on Wednesday that annualized revenue will reach $2.4 billion by the midpoint of this year.
Annualized sales through July, or the first six months of fiscal 2025, will increase 60% from a year earlier, Databricks CFO Dave Conte said at an investor briefing concurrent with the company’s Data and AI Summit in San Francisco on Wednesday.
Databricks’ growth contrasts with parts of the software industry that have continued to struggle since soaring inflation and rising interest rates in 2022 put an end to the extended bull market. In recent weeks Okta, Salesforce, UiPath and other software companies have blamed disappointing results or guidance on the economy or other macro issues.
“Obviously there’s some volatility going on in enterprise software, but I’ve been really eager to get up and share how we’re performing financially,” Conte said. “It’s pretty exciting.”
Databricks is one of a handful of prominent venture-backed software makers that have long been on the path to an IPO. Others include Canva, Figma and Stripe. However, the IPO market has been quiet for over two years, even with some activity in 2024. In April, security software company Rubrikdebuted on the New York Stock Exchange.
While Conte didn’t provide an update on Databricks’ plans to go public, he did say that business is strengthening. In March, the company told media outlets outlets that it generated $1.6 billion in revenue for the year ending Jan. 31, up more than 50% year over year. The 11-year-old startup had an annualized run rate of $1.5 billion and 50% growth for the quarter that ended July 31, 2023.
When it issued those figures in September, Databricks said it had raised $500 million in funding, valuing the company at $43 billion. Top competitor Snowflake, which debuted on the NYSE in 2020, was valued at $43.6 billion at the end of Wednesday’s trading session.
In the January quarter, Databricks saw 221 transactions that exceeded $1 million, Conte said. Existing clients are spending more, and the company is adding Fortune 500 clients, he said. Net revenue retention in the 2024 fiscal year, which ended in January, was higher than 140%. That figure indicates growth from existing customers.
Meanwhile, Databricks is investing in growth. Research and development spending as a percentage of revenue was 33% in each of the past three fiscal years, compared with 19% for its peer group and 23% for a group of 89 companies that have gone public since 2018, Conte said. Databricks’ subscription gross margin for the 2024 fiscal year was above 80%.
Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi told reporters in a briefing on Wednesday that some growth is coming from the data warehouse product the company launched in 2020. That business topped $400 million in annualized revenue.
“I think by any B2B standard, it’s one of the fastest-growing probably out there,” Ghodsi said.
Databricks and Snowflake have been trying to reduce costs of cleaning up and running queries for clients by using a standard format called Apache Iceberg. Last week Databricks said it was paying over $1 billion to buy Tabular, a startup whose founders created Iceberg. Snowflake was also bidding for Tabular, CNBC reported.
Chris Martin of Coldplay performs live at San Siro Stadium, Milan, Italy, in July 2017.
Mairo Cinquetti | NurPhoto | Getty Images
Days after Astronomer CEO Andy Byron resigned from the tech startup, the HR exec who was with him at the infamous Coldplay concert has left as well.
“Kristin Cabot is no longer with Astronomer, she has resigned,” a company spokesperson wrote in an email to CNBC Thursday. Cabot was the company’s chief people officer.
Cabot and Byron, who is married with children, were shown in an intimate moment on the ‘kiss cam’ at a recent Coldplay show in Boston, and immediately hid when they saw their faces on the big screen. Lead singer Chris Martin said, “Either they’re having an affair or they’re just very shy.” An attendee’s video of the incident went viral.
Byron resigned from the company on Saturday. Both Cabot and Byron have been removed the company’s leadership team webpage.
Pete DeJoy, Astronomer’s interim CEO, wrote in a post earlier this week that recent and unexpected national attention has turned the company into “a household name.”
In May, the New York-based company, which commercializes open source software, announced a $93 million investment round led by Bain Ventures and other investors, including Salesforce Ventures.
Elon Musk‘s satellite internet service Starlink said it had a “network outage” on Thursday. The company said it was working on a solution.
There were more than 60,000 reports of an outage on Downdetector, a site that logs issues.
Starlink is owned and operated by SpaceX, which is also run by Musk.
Musk apologized for the outage on his social media platform X and said, “Service will be restored shortly.”
Musk posted earlier Thursday that the company’s direct-to-cell-phone service was “growing fast” following the announcement that T-Mobile‘s Starlink-powered satellite service was available to the public.
T-Mobile said the T-Satellite service was built to keep phones connected “in places no carrier towers can reach.”
Starlink didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Starlink internet speeds and reliability decrease with popularity, a recent study found.
It wasn’t immediately clear if the T-Satellite service was affected by or involved in the outage.
The Intel logo is displayed on a sign in front of Intel headquarters on July 16, 2025 in Santa Clara, California.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images
Intel reported second-quarter results on Thursday that beat Wall Street expectations on revenue, as the company’s new CEO Lip-Bu Tan announced significant cuts in chip factory construction. The stock ticked higher in extended trading.
Here’s how the chipmaker did versus LSEG consensus estimates:
Earnings per share: Loss of 10 cents per share, adjusted.
Revenue: $12.86 billion versus $11.92 billion estimated
Intel said it expects revenue for the third-quarter of $13.1 billion at the midpoint of its range, versus the average analyst estimate of $12.65 billion. The chipmaker said that it expects to break even on earnings while analysts were looking for earnings of 4 cents per share.
For the second quarter, Intel reported a net loss of $2.9 billion, or 67 cents per share, compared with a $1.61 billion net loss, or 38 cents per share, in the year-earlier period. Earnings per share were not comparable to analyst estimates due to an $800 million impairment charge, “related to excess tools with no identified re-use,” the company said. That resulted in an EPS adjustment of about 20 cents.
The report was Intel’s second since Lip-Bu Tan took over as CEO in March, promising to make the chipmaker’s products competitive again, and to reduce bureaucracy and layers of management, including slashing staff in Oregon and California.
In a memo to employees published on Thursday, Tan said that the first few months of his tenure had “not been easy.” He said that the company had “completed the majority” of its planned layoffs, amounting to 15% of the workforce, and that it plans to end the year with 75,000 employees. Intel previously said it was trying to reduce operating expenses by $17 billion in 2025.
Intel shares are up about 13% this year as of Thursday’s close after plummeting 60% in 2024, their worst year on record.
Tan also announced several other spending cuts in the memo, particularly in the company’s costly foundry division, which makes chips for other companies and is still looking for a big customer to anchor the business.
Intel said its foundry business had an operating loss of $3.17 billion on $4.4 billion in revenue.
Tan said that Intel had cancelled planned fab projects in Germany and Poland, and will consolidate its testing and assembly operations in Vietnam and Malaysia. He added that the company would slow down the pace of its construction of a cutting-edge chip factory in Ohio, depending on market demand and if it can secure big customers for the facility.
“Over the past several years, the company invested too much, too soon – without adequate demand,” Tan wrote. “In the process, our factory footprint became needlessly fragmented and underutilized.”
Tan wrote that the company’s forthcoming chip manufacturing process, called 14A, will be built out based on confirmed customer commitments.
“There are no more blank checks. Every investment must make economic sense,” Tan wrote.
The company’s client computing group, which is primarily comprised of sales of central processors for PCs, had $7.9 billion in sales, down 3% on an annual basis.
Revenue in the data center group, which includes some AI chips but is mostly central processors for servers, rose 4% to $3.9 billion. Tan wrote in his memo that Intel wants to regain market share in data center chips, and is looking for a permanent leader for the business. Longtime rival Advanced Micro Devices has increasingly been winning server business from cloud customers.
Tan added he would personally review and approve all chip designs before they are taped out, which is the final step of the design process before a new chip is manufactured.