There’s a funny kind of game that the latest of late-stage startups must play when raising money. They often have to sell more shares than they want or risk offending some of their existing VCs.
This scenario recently played out with AI big-data company Databricks and its latest $5 billion raise announced Thursday, co-founder and CEO Ali Ghodsi (pictured above) told TechCrunch.
“We wanted to raise $1 billion, but then The Information printed this article saying that Databricks is doing a big fundraise. They did that in the middle of our conference. We were heads down with our conference, and we were not actually at all focused on fundraising,” Ghodsi recalled, referring to a conference that took place in June.
“As soon as that article went out, there was a long line of investors that started calling. My phone blew up. It was like the worst timing for us because we were busy with our conference,” he said.
It was an enviable problem that turned the news report into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
“The interest level was just insane. Just from this select group of investors that we looked at, there was $15 billion of interest,” he said.
When there’s that much desire to get into a deal, telling some long-term backers no is a recipe for hard feelings. Databricks decided to issue more stock, and in July, sent out a press release announcing it had closed its new round at a $188 billion valuation. (The company didn’t disclose at the time how much it had raised)
On Thursday, Databricks shared it raised $5 billion from a paragraph worth of VCs that it let in on the deal and that its valuation pushed higher to a nice round $190 billion. The $5 billion round was led by Coatue and several others, including Blackstone, MGX, various accounts associated with various arms of T. Rowe Price, and new investor Sixth Street Growth. (Sixth Street is the firm founded by former Goldman Sachs chief investment officer Alan Waxman.) About two dozen VCs were named as participants.
Why were they all so eager? Databricks seems like a sure bet.
Ghodsi said his company has hit $7 billion of annualized run rate revenue, which is currently growing at 80% and is cash-flow positive. Its core product, a cloud data warehouse, is $1.5 billion of that run-rate, and still growing at 100% year-over-year, he said.
Plus, Databricks has the magic AI pixie dust. It’s database for agents, Lakebase, launched in June, 2025, and has hit $100M revenue run-rate. Its AI chatbot tool Genie, that can do business analysis on the spot, “is insanely popular,” he said.
So, if the business is doing so well, why raise more capital? The company had already raised $20 billion over the past 20 months.
AI is expensive, Ghodsi said. Databricks has multi-billion dollar cloud commitments with all three of the major hyperscalers. On top of that, “AI research is very expensive,” he said, adding that the company has an AI research team of 100 people, a highly competitive area.
Plus, Databricks is shopping. “We do a lot of M&A.” Ghodsi said, referencing an acquisition the company announced this week of Electric, the company that makes the lightweight Postgres database PGlite, a means for agents to spin up databases (terms undisclosed). In June, it bought AI cybersecurity company Panther; In March, it bought two startups.
There was a time when a $1 billion round was considered a massive and difficult raise. In this age of AI spending, where startups are raising $1 billion for a seed/Series A right out of the gate, that amount is now a pittance.
Still, Databrick’s private fundraising, instead of going public, has become something of a meme among the Valley. When it announced this round last month, people joked online that it has raised so many, it was running out of letters of the alphabet.
Ghodsi told CNBC that he still wants to take the company public one day. With such a giant roster of investors who will want to cash out one day, how can he promise anything else?
But today, he wants to focus on investing in AI, he said. Given the expenses involved in that, perhaps doing so out of the public eye is a wise idea.
Plus, when he can command an instant $15 billion of interest, and on his own terms, what’s the rush?