Databricks, a data analytics platform using artificial intelligence (AI), said on Thursday it secured more than $500 million in a funding round that valued the company at $43 billion, marking one of the biggest funding events for private tech companies this year amid AI-fueled optimism.
The new round, led by T. Rowe Price, could mark the last round of private funding as the data company gears up for the public market. Chipmaker Nvidia, another beneficiary of the AI boom, and credit card firm Capital One Financial, also participated in the latest funding round.
The company plans to use the funds to build out foundation models in partnership with Nvidia, which makes the core computing chips that run AI models, Ali Ghodsi, chief executive of Databricks, told Reuters in an interview.
«You want to have models that are really good at specific tasks. It matters to us to be able to do this for our enterprise clients,» Ghodsi said.
Other marquee names in the venture capital industry like Andreessen Horowitz, Baillie Gifford, Morgan Stanley's Counterpoint Global, Fidelity Management & Research and Tiger Global also participated in the round.
AI, the latest buzzword in the technology space, has captivated the interest of investors from Silicon Valley to Wall Street.
Following the massive popularity of OpenAI's chatbot ChatGPT, many players in the industry including Anthropic, Hugging