Data science analytics platform Databricks announced Monday that it raised $1 billion in a Series G round led by new investor Franklin Templeton. The fresh capital puts the decacorn at a whopping $28 billion post-money valuation.
Databricks is the latest Bay Area-based data analytics company to experience rapid growth. Despite a challenging year, others including C3.ai and Snowflake had successful debuts on Wall Street. This latest funding round for Databricks, which a number of high-profile tech giants like Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet and Salesforce all participated in, is fueling speculation that the company may follow suit and pursue an IPO in the first half of this year.
Databricks was created by the co-founders of Apache Spark, an open source framework for distributed computation across multiple machines. The Databricks platform provides teams with the ability to process massive amounts of data in the cloud that can then be used to power AI.
“We see this investment and our continued rapid growth as further validation of our vision for a simple, open and unified data platform that can support all data-driven use cases, from BI to AI,” Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and CEO of Databricks, said in a statement.
The company’s cloud-based solution helps organizations eliminate the cost of legacy data structures so that data teams can collaborate and innovate faster, according to Ghodsi.
The additional capital will allow Databricks to scale and support the rapid adoption of its primary product. The company is making a massive hiring push as part of its growth effort.
Databricks is now hiring for dozens of open roles across nearly every department at its San Francisco headquarters. A variety of positions span the company’s engineering, finance, product and sales teams, to name a few.
More than 5,000 companies worldwide use Databricks to crunch numbers including Comcast, H&M, Condé Nast and Nationwide.
Founded in 2013, Databricks has raised $1.9 billion in financing to date, according to Crunchbase.
