Databricks Now Worth $100B. Will It Reach $1T?

Databricks won’t be going public anytime soon, if its latest funding round announced yesterday is any indication. But the lack of an IPO doesn’t appear to matter to the company’s skyrocketing growth. In fact, the company could be on pace to become a $1-trillion company, according to CEO Ali Ghodsi.

Databricks started out more than a decade ago as a private cloud for running Apache Spark, a distributed computing framework created at UC Berkeley AMPLab. While Spark is a powerful tool, it can be difficult to run efficiently, so who better than the creators of Spark to run it on your behalf?

Over the years, Databricks has morphed into something far bigger than Spark and Spark-related projects like Spark SQL, Spark Streaming, graph-based Spark (GraphX), and machine learning Spark (MLlib). The company has launched a host of tools for helping customers manage their data, such as the Databricks Delta Lake and Unity Catalog.

Since the introduction of generative AI in late 2022, the company has invested heavily to make it a leader in the nascent space. It bought an AI factory in the acquisition of MosaicML for $1.3 billion in 2023, and since then it has launched AI products like AI/BI Genie, Agent Bricks, and the Databrick Assistant.

The moves would appear to be resonating with customers. The company has added 5,000 customers over the past two years, which has corresponded with revenue more than doubling, from $1.6 billion in 2023 to an estimated $3.7 billion for 2025. The company currently has about 9,000 employees, and could finish the year with 3,000 new hires, CEO and co-founder Ghodsi told the Wall Street Journal.

That growth has put a spotlight on the San Francisco company. In his interview with the WSJ, Ghodsi said the company wasn’t looking for money, but so many potential investors have been calling on him that it was tough to say no. The company, which raised $10 billion with a Series J round in 2024, didn’t disclose exactly how much it’s on pace to raise with its Series K round, which it expects to close soon. But with the pace of customer growth and internal hiring, it would be surprising if it was much smaller than the 2024 round.

What we do know is this: the discussions Databricks is having with investors pegs the company valuation at $100 billion. That’s a whopping 61% increase from the Series J round, which closed just eight months ago.

With so much private capital flowing in to Databricks’ coffers, it has put a damper on the need to go to the public markets to raise money for growth. An IPO has been expected from Databricks for years, but it doesn’t appear to be imminent.

Whether or not Databricks goes public soon, the company is ramping up business. At the current rate of growth, the sky appears to be the limit for Databricks. In fact, according to Ghodsi, the company could reach the 12-digit mark in valuation, becoming part of an elite group of companies worth $1 trillion or more.

“The finance team tells me to not use this term, but I think Databricks has a shot to be a trillion-dollar company,” Ghodsi told the WSJ. “But we have a lot of work ahead of us to get there.”

Only 13 companies currently have valuations in excess of $1 trillion. Hitting that mark will almost certainly require being a public company. If that is the goal, then the size of the company will need to expand dramatically.

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