Romanian-founded data and AI giant Databricks announces new USD 4 bln funding, increased valuation
Databricks, the data analytics and artificial intelligence company co-founded by Romanian professors Ion Stoica and Matei Zaharia, announced on Tuesday, December 16, that it is raising USD 4 billion in funding at a valuation of USD 134 billion, according to CNBC.
The new valuation represents a 34% increase compared to the August round, when Databricks reached the USD 100 billion threshold, becoming one of the few private companies to surpass this level, alongside SpaceX, ByteDance, and OpenAI.
The funding round was led by Insight Partners, Fidelity Management & Research Company, and JPMorgan Asset Management, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz.
The company intends to use the capital to support customers in building applications as artificial intelligence accelerates development. Databricks aims to become the primary provider for organizations that want to build and run AI agents capable of executing tasks.
“It’s kind of a land grab, with do-it-yourself winning right now. So that’s a big opportunity,” said Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and CEO of Databricks. “I think that, overall, we will see massive value generated by AI. Does this justify the level of all investments in data centers and energy? I don’t know. I would be a little worried that we’ve gone too far,” he added.
In the same interview, the Databricks CEO did not rule out a public listing in 2026.
Databricks reported annualized revenues of USD 4.8 billion in the third fiscal quarter, up 55% year over year. The figure is higher than the USD 4 billion announced at the beginning of this year. Growth accelerated compared to the previous quarter, with a visible increase in revenues from the AI segment.
The more traditional segments of the business are also gaining traction. More than 1,000 Databricks customers are now using the Lakebase database software for fast ingestion of incoming data, the company’s CEO said.
Databricks was founded in 2013 in San Francisco and counts among its founders Romanians Ion Stoica (59 years old) and Matei Zaharia (39 years old), both with academic and research careers at the University of California, Berkeley. The two are the creators of the Apache Spark data processing engine. The company ranked third in the CNBC Disruptor 50 list for 2025.
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