Databricks has just raised $4 billion at $134 billion valuation. Its AI business is heating up right now, and people feel like the IPO window is starting to crack open, and this is why Databricks may be getting itself ready for the moment when they are going to IPO very soon. So we're going to get into all of that on the podcast today. And before we do, I wanted to mention, if you want to try all of the AI models I talk about on this show, I'd love for you to try my own startup, which is AIbox.ai.
I'll leave a link in the description. You can access to models from Databricks, among a ton of other people's, tons of open source models, tons of really cool image generators you may not have tried before. You can test all of these models side by side. And for $20 a month, you have access to all of them.
OpenAI, Google, Gemini, Brock 11 Labs for audio, tons of amazing models. I'll leave a link in the description to AIbox.ai, and I hope that saves you some money. It feels like the market for IPOs is starting to warm up a little bit. It's obviously gone through a long, cold winter where a lot of even the biggest companies, I mean, you could talk about like Stripe and SpaceX, these massive companies that in the past traditionally would have 100% IPO'd by now, have not.
But there are a bunch of startups that have started to IPO, and they've seen some mixed results on the public markets. In the past, this was the number one way their company was going to raise, you know, all their money they needed to make it to an IPO. It was for investors, it was for employees. But it feels like today there are a ton of startups that have no intention of going public.
They've been running this private companies, and I think this makes a lot of sense today because right now you can raise insane amounts of money. I mean, just look at OpenAI's latest $40 billion round. Like, that is an absurd amount of money that I think a lot of companies would only dream of raising publicly, and OpenAI was able to raise that privately. So, well, it feels like you can raise insane amounts of money.
What is the point? Well, as a private company, what is the point of an IPO? I think Databricks is asking that question right now. It's a data intelligence company.
They just raised $4 million. This is their series L round. Like I mentioned, this is at $134 billion valuation. That is up 34% from their $100 billion valuation that they got just three months ago.
So, like, this is massive, massive growth. I think this is Databricks' third major venture base in less than a year, and it comes right now. The company is focused on building products that help people in the AI revolution. They are more of like a data, kind of, not the customer-facing company you see, but they are supporting all of the AI models.
It's a database for AI agents that they've currently created. They have an agent platform, and they have an app that lets companies deploy and build data and AI applications. So, right now they're investing very heavily into their database for AI agents. They call this Lakebase.
It's based on an open source database called Postgres, which is enabled by a $1 billion acquisition of a startup called Neon, and it is aimed at corporate developers, so people that are vibe-coding projects. I think right now their AI agent platform, which is called Agent Bricks, is also aimed at helping businesses build and deploy AI agents that can cap into their data. So, the company has a whole bunch of really big deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars with AI Labs. They have some with Anthropic and also with OpenAI, and they're offering their models within the enterprise products of OpenAI and Anthropic.
So, they have a lot of these big deals. This Series L round, I would say, isn't very common. Like, you don't commonly see a Series L round. Databricks, obviously, has managed to raise venture funding after, you know, they just keep raising their valuation.
It was at $60 billion around this time last year, and so, obviously, you know, being able to raise this all the way up to $134 billion is an impressive feat. I think this shows how strong investors believe in, you know, these companies that are helping use data to fuel AI and everything that's happening in that space. On Tuesday, Databricks said that it now generates a run rate revenue of more than $4.8 billion, and that's up to 55% from a year ago. So, of all of that, more than a billion dollars came from this AI product.
So, Databricks is obviously on an absolute tear. This is what they said about it when asked, you know, in a press release. They said, the parallel rise of bi-coding and generative AI is accelerating the development of AI intelligent applications. And the enterprise Databricks will use this new capital to help customers build AI apps and agents on the proprietary data, leveraging Lakebase as the system of record Databricks apps as the user experience later, and Agent Bricks to power multi-agent systems.
So, the Wall Street Journal was just reporting on this, and they said that the company is also going to use some of the money to add thousands of new jobs in Asia, Europe, Latin America, as well as bring on a bunch of new AI researchers. And I would say, you know, don't underestimate how expensive that can be. We've seen Mark Zuckerberg offer, I mean, he denies it, but basically billion-dollar pay packages to AI researchers when it comes to, not just their pay, but when it comes to equity and stock and a bunch of other things. Like, these AI researchers are paid in enormous amounts of money.
So, Databricks need some of the top-tier, I think, researchers right now because of the place that they're sitting and the companies that they're working with, and that will cost them a lot of money. So, they need to continue to raise money in order to do that. The co-founder and CEO is Ali Goetzee, and talking about all this, said, Enterprises are rapidly reimagining how they build intelligent applications, and the convergence of generative AI with new coding paradigms is opening the door to entirely new workloads. I think this is a really interesting time to watch the company grow and the whole industry.
This latest round that they just raised was led by Insight Partners, Fidelity, JP Morgan Asset Management, Andreessen Horwitz, BlackRock, Blackstone, Kotu, GIC, MGX, NEA, Ontario Teacher, Pension Plan, Robinhood Ventures. I mean, basically, they've been Thrive Capital on here. Like, it feels like all the big players jumped in on this round. The only person I'm seeing missing here is NVIDIA, who I typically would have expected on a round like this to contribute.
But a lot of big players on this round, and so it seems like, you know, this isn't just one or two strategic partners. This is all the top suspect VC firms getting in on this. I think it signals, it's a really strong signal for Databricks that a couple things are happening. The revenue is growing, the demand for their products is increasing, and they have a lot of big strategic partnerships with OpenAI and Adropix.
So I would continue, I'd expect to continue seeing Databricks grow in the future and probably grow almost as rapidly as they've been doing. I mean, up to 55% since last year is some incredible metrics and some incredible growth. So hopefully we continue to see that, and a big congratulations to everyone over on the team at Databricks. Thanks so much for tuning into the podcast if you learned anything new today.
Make sure to leave a rating and review wherever you get your podcast on Apple or Spotify. I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day. And make sure to check out AIbox.ai. I'll leave a link to that in the description.