The massive funding round gives the data lakehouse architecture company a valuation of $38 billion. Databricks previously announced that Counterpoint Global (Morgan Stanley), BNY Mellon, Clearbridge and the University of California Endowment also participated in the latest round. The company held a $1 billion series G round in February, bringing their 2021 total to more than $2.5 billion. Ali Ghodsi, CEO of Databricks, said the $1.6 billion round of funding validates their “vision for an open and unified approach to data and AI on any cloud.” “We are delighted to once again include our most strategic partners in this latest round of funding,” Ghodsi said. “As we jointly make more organizations successful in their move to the cloud and accelerate the adoption of the lakehouse architecture, we’re excited to see these partnerships – and the ecosystems formed around them – continue to grow for decades to come.” Databricks said the funding would be used to “accelerate innovation and adoption” of the lakehouse as popularity around the data architecture continues to grow. “Databricks has pioneered a simple and open architecture for data and AI, which brings the reliability, governance, and performance of a data warehouse directly to the data lakes that most organizations already store all of their data in,” the company said in a statement. “Rather than being forced to move data out of the data lake, and between various disconnected and legacy systems for different use cases, Databricks customers are building analytics platforms on AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud to support every data and analytics workload in a single, unified location.” Databricks is in heavy competition with other data warehouse leaders like Snowflake, Vertica/Micro Focus, Yellowbrick and, in some cases, AWS. Microsoft also has its own Azure Synapse Analytics, which offers both a data warehouse and a data lake in one service. But in the past year, Microsoft has tacitly backed Databrick’s “lakehouse” idea, which they coined.
