{"id":14128,"date":"2019-02-05T11:36:59","date_gmt":"2019-02-05T11:36:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rsoftsolution.com\/blog\/databricks-raises-250m-at-a-2-75b-valuation-for-its-analytics-platform.html"},"modified":"2019-02-05T11:36:59","modified_gmt":"2019-02-05T11:36:59","slug":"databricks-raises-250m-at-a-2-75b-valuation-for-its-analytics-platform","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rbsitsoftwaresolution.in\/blog\/databricks-raises-250m-at-a-2-75b-valuation-for-its-analytics-platform.html","title":{"rendered":"Databricks raises $250M at a $2.75B valuation for its analytics platform"},"content":{"rendered":"

Databricks<\/a>, the company behind the Apache Spark big data analytics engine, today announced that it has raised a $250 million Series E round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Coatue Management, Microsoft and NEA, also participated in this round, which brings the company\u2019s total funding to $498.5 million. Microsoft\u2019s involvement here is probably a bit of a surprise, but it\u2019s worth noting that it also worked with Databricks <\/a> on the launch of Azure Databricks as a first-party service<\/a> on the platform, something that\u2019s still a rarity in the Azure cloud.<\/p>\n

As Databricks also today announced, its annual recurring revenue now exceeds $100 million. The company didn\u2019t share whether it\u2019s cash flow-positive at this point, but Databricks CEO and co-founder Ali Ghodsi shared that the company\u2019s valuation is now $2.75 billion.<\/p>\n

Current customers, which the company says number around 2,000, include the likes of Nielsen, Hotels.com, Overstock, Bechtel, Shell and HP.<\/p>\n

While Databricks is obviously known for its contributions to Apache Spark, <\/a> the company itself monetizes that work by offering its Unified Analytics platform on top of it. This platform allows enterprises to build their data pipelines across data storage systems and prepare data sets for data scientists and engineers. To do this, Databricks offers shared notebooks and tools for building, managing and monitoring data pipelines, and then uses that data to build machine learning models, for example. Indeed, training and deploying these models is one of the company\u2019s focus areas these days, which makes sense, given that this is one of the main use cases for big data, after all.<\/p>\n

On top of that, Databricks also offers a fully managed service for hosting all of these tools.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\u201cDatabricks is the clear winner in the big data platform race,\u201d said Ben Horowitz, co-founder and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, <\/a> in today\u2019s announcement. \u201cIn addition, they have created a new category atop their world-beating Apache Spark platform called Unified Analytics that is growing even faster. As a result, we are thrilled to invest in this round.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ghodsi told me that Horowitz was also instrumental in getting the company to re-focus on growth. The company was already growing fast, of course, but Horowitz asked him why Databricks wasn\u2019t growing faster. Unsurprisingly, given that it\u2019s an enterprise company, that means aggressively hiring a larger sales force \u2014 and that\u2019s costly. Hence the company\u2019s need to raise at this point.<\/p>\n

As Ghodsi told me, one of the areas the company wants to focus on is the Asia Pacific region, where overall cloud usage is growing fast. The other area the company is focusing on is support for more verticals like mass media and entertainment, federal agencies and fintech firms, which also comes with its own cost, given that the experts there don\u2019t come cheap.<\/p>\n

Ghodsi likes to call this \u201cboring AI,\u201d since it\u2019s not as exciting as self-driving cars. In his view, though, the enterprise companies that don\u2019t start using machine learning now will inevitably be left behind in the long run. \u201cIf you don\u2019t get there, there\u2019ll be no place for you in the next 20 years,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Engineering, of course, will also get a chunk of this new funding, with an emphasis on relatively new products like MLFlow<\/a> and Delta<\/a>, two tools Databricks recently developed and that make it easier to manage the life cycle of machine learning models and build the necessary data pipelines to feed them.<\/p>\n

Article source: http:\/\/feedproxy.google.com\/~r\/techcrunchIt\/~3\/7fHXvtVtL1I\/<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Databricks, the company behind the Apache Spark big data analytics engine, today announced that it has raised a $250 million Series E round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Coatue Management, Microsoft <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[19],"tags":[25],"class_list":["post-14128","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-enterprise-software","tag-enterprise"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t