Databricks, the Data and AI company, today announced a $1.6 Billion round of funding to accelerate innovation and adoption of the data lakehouse, as the data architecture’s popularity across data-driven organizations continues to grow at a rapid pace. The Series H funding, led by Counterpoint Global (Morgan Stanley), puts Databricks at a $38 billion post-money valuation. Counterpoint Global is joined by other new investors including Baillie Gifford, ClearBridge Investments and UC Investments (Office of the Chief Investment Officer of the Regents of the University of California). Existing investors participating in the round include Andreessen Horowitz, funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments), Coatue Management, Fidelity Management & Research, Franklin Templeton, GIC, Greenoaks, Octahedron Capital, funds and accounts managed by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc., Tiger Global Management and Whale Rock Capital Management.

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As further commitment to accelerate lakehouse adoption globally, Databricks also announced the appointment of former Salesforce executive, Andy Kofoid, as President of Global Field Operations.

As the world’s first lakehouse platform in the cloud, Databricks has pioneered an open and unified 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. 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 lakehouses on AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud to support every data and analytics workload on a single platform. As a result, they’re able to avoid architectural complexity, significantly reduce infrastructure costs, increase data team productivity, and innovate faster.

Today, hundreds of leading organizations around the world are using the Databricks Lakehouse Platform.

“AT&T has been changing the way people live, work and play for the past 144 years. As part of our goal to create new and exciting customer experiences that connect people with who and what they love, AT&T is modernizing our data ecosystem and migrating it to the cloud. This involves moving petabytes of data to the cloud. We leverage Data Lakehouse in Databricks for our most granular data as well as real-time data pipelines supporting key AI/ML applications.” – Andy Markus, Chief Data Officer, AT&T

This new round brings Databricks’ total funding to almost $3.6B, and will be used to accelerate the company’s lead in the massive and rapidly growing data lakehouse market. Driven by open standards, cloud adoption and the continued rise of machine learning applications, the company intends to build on its lead by investing in innovations that further simplify AI, preserve choice and flexibility across all major public clouds, and establish the lakehouse as a modern replacement to the legacy data warehouse. In addition, under Kofoid’s leadership, the company will invest to accelerate adoption of the Databricks Lakehouse Platform globally, by entering new markets, enabling and growing its partner ecosystem, and building a broad catalog of industry solutions.

“This new investment is a reflection of the rapid adoption and incredible customer demand we’re seeing for the Databricks Lakehouse Platform and underscores the industry and investor confidence in our vision – that lakehouse is the data architecture of the future,” said Ali Ghodsi, Co-Founder and CEO of Databricks. “This marks a thrilling new chapter that will allow us to accelerate our pace of innovation and further invest in the success of data-driven organizations on their journey to the lakehouse.”

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