US "super unicorn" DataBricks' valuation raised again! The company is in talks for financing at a valuation of $43 billion.

On Friday, August 25th, Bloomberg cited two informed sources as saying that the American software company Databricks is in discussions with T. Rowe Price for a new round of financing that would bring Databricks' valuation to $43 billion.

The current negotiations are still preliminary and may fall through. If this round of financing is successful, Databricks' valuation will be significantly higher than the $38 billion valuation two years ago when it was led by Counterpoint Global.

Databricks primarily provides data, analytics, and artificial intelligence tools and services to enterprises.

The CEO of the company, Ali Ghodsi, recently stated that the company has sufficient capital and does not need financing, but may consider it for strategic reasons:

Our negotiations with investors have never stopped, and we have received many requests to invest in us.

While many startups have seen their valuations decline and have been forced to accept downgraded financing from investors, Databricks, headquartered in San Francisco, has gained favor in the venture capital community due to its focus on artificial intelligence.

Earlier this year, Databricks announced the launch of a large-scale language model called Dolly, which helps customers build their own generative artificial intelligence applications similar to ChatGPT. In June, the company announced that its annual revenue had reached $1 billion. In the same month, Databricks announced its acquisition of generative AI platform MosaicML for approximately $1.3 billion.

Databricks has long been a highly anticipated unicorn in the market, but Ghodsi stated on Thursday that the company has not yet determined a specific date for its IPO.

Over a decade ago, in the AI laboratory at UC Berkeley, Ghodsi and his partners initiated the Spark project: to create an engine that could handle large amounts of data and machine algorithms more easily, and they open-sourced the code. Compared to most open-source projects, which target infrastructure engineers with strong technical requirements, Spark is aimed at a wider customer base and has added many new APIs at the higher level, lowering the technical barrier.

The company has also gained favor from Microsoft. Prior to Microsoft's investment in Databricks in 2019, CEO Nadella was promoting a cloud-first strategy, and the collaboration between Azure and Databricks entered Microsoft's enterprise licensing agreement. Microsoft transformed from a cloud product with a competitive disadvantage in big data to an industry leader, forming a situation where the three cloud giants stand side by side. Due to the fact that almost all large enterprises have an ELA with Microsoft, the budget originally allocated for cloud and Office naturally flowed to Databricks.

Since 2019, Databricks has experienced unprecedented growth. As of February 2021, the company has raised nearly $2 billion in funding, including a $1 billion Series G financing led by Franklin Templeton, bringing Databricks' valuation to $28 billion. After the latest round of financing, Databricks' valuation has reached $38 billion.