Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and chief executive officer of Databricks Inc., speaks during a Bloomberg Technology television interview in San Francisco on Oct. 22, 2019.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
One of the world’s most valuable private tech companies is raising billions more in cash and is in no rush to go public, sources told CNBC.
San Francisco-based Databricks is raising at least another $5 billion in its latest funding round, though it could raise up to $8 billion given the round is ongoing, according to several people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be named because the discussions were private. The latest raise would value the company at $55 billion and could top the largest round of the year, by OpenAI.
The latest funding is designed to help Databricks employees sell shares, one of the people said. Reducing pressure from employees to cash out also reduces the need for a liquidity event such as an IPO. One source said the funding round makes Databricks’ highly anticipated public debut less urgent. But it could still happen in the back half of next year.
Databricks was founded in 2013 and sells software that helps enterprises organize data and build their own generative AI products. It uses machine learning to help clients from AT&T to Walgreens parse and make sense of massive troves of data.
This equity round could be the largest in a banner year for artificial intelligence funding, when 1 in 3 venture dollars has gone to an AI startup, according to CB Insights. OpenAI holds the record in 2024, raising $6.6 billion in October at a $157 billion valuation.
Databricks last raised $500 million at a $43 billion valuation. It’s backed by Nvidia, Capital One, Andreessen Horowitz, Baillie Gifford, Fidelity, Insight Partners, Tiger Global and others.
The Information first reported that Databricks was raising money.
The firm has capitalized on the momentum in artificial intelligence. This summer, it acquired MosaicML, a $1.3 billion software startup that focuses on large language models that can churn out natural-sounding text. Databricks told investors earlier this year that annualized revenue would hit $2.4 billion by the midpoint of 2024.
Its decision to stay private comes as software stocks have struggled to get out of a rut brought on by higher interest rates. Shares of rival Snowflake are down 13% this year. While its fellow software IPO candidates such as Stripe have taken significant haircuts on valuations, Databricks has grown its value while expanding its employee base.
CEO Ali Ghodsi said at a conference Nov. 20 that he’s optimizing for the success of Databricks over the next decade or two, not optimizing for an IPO.
“If we were going to go, the earliest would be, let’s say, mid-next year, or something like that,” Ghodsi said at Newcomer’s Cerebral Valley AI Conference. “So, you know, could happen next year.”
A Databricks spokesperson declined to comment.
Correction: OpenAI raised $6.6 billion in October at a $157 billion valuation. A previous version of this article misstated the valuation amount.
FILE PHOTO: Ariel Cohen during a panel at DLD Munich Conference 2020, Europe’s big innovation conference, Alte Kongresshalle, Munich.
Picture Alliance for DLD | Hubert Burda Media | AP
Navan, a developer of corporate travel and expense software, expects its market cap to be as high as $6.5 billion in its IPO, according to an updated regulatory filing on Friday.
The company said it anticipates selling shares at $24 to $26 each. Its valuation in that range would be about $3 billion less than where private investors valued Navan in 2022, when the company announced a $300 million funding round.
CoreWeave, Circle and Figma have led a resurgence in tech IPOs in 2025 after a drought that lasted about three years. Navan filed its original prospectus on Sept. 19, with plans to trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “NAVN.”
Last week, the U.S. government entered a shutdown that has substantially reduced operations inside of agencies including the SEC. In August, the agency said its electronic filing system, EDGAR, “is operated pursuant to a contract and thus will remain fully functional as long as funding for the contractor remains available through permitted means.”
Cerebras, which makes artificial intelligence chips, withdrew its registration for an IPO days after the shutdown began.
Navan CEO Ariel Cohen and technology chief Ilan Twig started the company under the name TripActions in 2015. It’s based in Palo Alto, California, and had around 3,400 employees at the end of July.
For the July quarter, Navan recorded a $38.6 million net loss on $172 million in revenue, which was up about 29% year over year. Competitors include Expensify, Oracle and SAP. Expensify stock closed at $1.64on Friday, down from its $27 IPO price in 2021.
Navan ranked 39th on CNBC’s 2025 Disruptor 50 list, after also appearing in 2024.
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, speaking with CNBC’s Jim Cramer during a CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer event at the New York Stock Exchange on Oct. 7th, 2025.
Kevin Stankiewicz | CNBC
Shares of Amazon, Nvidia and Tesla each dropped around 5% on Friday, as tech’s megacaps lost $770 billion in market cap, following President Donald Trump’s threats for increased tariffs on Chinese goods.
With tech’s trillion-dollar companies occupying an increasingly large slice of the U.S. market, their declines send the Nasdaq down 3.6% and the S&P 500 down 2.7%. For both indexes, it was the worst day since April, when Trump said he would slap “reciprocal” duties on U.S. trading partners.
After market close on Friday, Trump declared in a social media post that the U.S. would impose a 100% tariff on China and on Nov. 1 it would apply export controls “on any and all critical software.”
Amazon, Nvidia and Tesla all slipped about 2% in extended trading following the post.
The president’s latest threats are disrupting, at least briefly, what had been a sustained rally in tech, built on hundreds of billions of dollars in planned spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure.
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In late September, Nvidia, which makes graphics processing units for training AI models, became the first company to reach a market cap of $4.5 trillion. Nvidia alone saw its market capitalization decline by nearly $229 billion on Friday.
OpenAI counts on Nvidia’s GPUs from a series of cloud suppliers, including Microsoft. OpenAI is only seeing rising demand.
In September it introduced the Sora 2 video creation app, and this week the company said the ChatGPT assistant now boasts over 800 million weekly users. But Microsoft must buy infrastructure to operate its cloud data centers. Microsoft’s market cap dropped by $85 billion on Friday.
The sell-off wiped out Amazon’s gains for the year. That stock is now down 2% so far in 2025. It competes with Microsoft to rent out GPUs from its cloud data centers, but it doesn’t have major business with OpenAI. The online retailer is now worth $121 billion less than it was on Thursday.
“There continues to be a lot of noise about the impact that tariffs will have on retail prices and consumption,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told analysts in July. “Much of it thus far has been wrong and misreported. As we said before, it’s impossible to know what will happen.”
Tesla, which introduced lower-priced vehicles on Tuesday, saw its market capitalization sink by $71 billion.
The automaker reports third-quarter results on Oct. 22, with Microsoft earnings scheduled for the following week. Nvidia reports in November.
Google parent Alphabet and Facebook owner Meta fell 2% and almost 4%, respectively.
Govini, a defense tech software startup taking on the likes of Palantir, has blown past $100 million in annual recurring revenue, the company announced Friday.
“We’re growing faster than 100% in a three-year CAGR, and I expect that next year we’ll continue to do the same,” CEO Tara Murphy Dougherty told CNBC’s Morgan Brennan in an interview. With how “big this market is, we can keep growing for a long, long time, and that’s really exciting.”
CAGR stands for compound annual growth rate, a measurement of the rate of return.
The Arlington, Virginia-based company also announced a $150 million growth investment from Bain Capital. It plans to use the money to expand its team and product offering to satisfy growing security demands.
In recent years, venture capitalists have poured more money into defense tech startups like Govini to satisfy heightened national security concerns and modernize the military as global conflict ensues.
The group, which includes unicorns like Palmer Luckey’s Anduril, Shield AI and artificial intelligence beneficiary Palantir, is taking on legacy giants such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, that have long leaned on contracts from the Pentagon.
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Dougherty, who previously worked at Palantir, said she hopes the company can seize a “vertical slice” of the defense technology space.
The 14-year-old Govini has already secured a string of big wins in recent years, including an over $900-million U.S. government contract and deals with the Department of War.
Govini is known for its flagship AI software Ark, which it says can help modernize the military’s defense tech supply chain by better managing product lifecycles as military needs grow more sophisticated.
“If the United States can get this acquisition system right, it can actually be a decisive advantage for us,” Dougherty said.
Looking ahead, Dougherty told CNBC that she anticipates some setbacks from the government shutdown.
Navy customers could be particularly hard hit, and that could put the U.S. at a major disadvantage.
While the U.S. is maintaining its AI dominance, China is outpacing its shipbuilding capacity and that needs to be taken “very seriously,” she added.