US-based data analytics software developer Databricks, which counts a host of corporate backers as investors, raised $1.6bn in a series H round led by investment bank Morgan Stanley’s Counterpoint Global unit. The round valued Databricks at $38bn post-money and also featured Baillie Gifford, ClearBridge Investments, Andreessen Horowitz, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, Coatue Management, Fidelity, Franklin Templeton, GIC, Greenoaks, Octahedron Capital, Tiger Global and Whale Rock Capital Management, among many other investors. Previous corporate investors include CapitalG and Salesforce Ventures, investment units for internet and technology conglomerate Alphabet and enterprise software producer Salesforce respectively, which had joined e-commerce group Amazon’s Web Services subsidiary and software provider Microsoft in a $1bn series G round for Databricks in February this year.
Launched in 2013, Databricks operates a cloud-based data management platform for aggregating and processing unstructured and structured data. The company intends to use the proceeds of this series H round to invest in technology innovation and enter new markets. It has raised about $3.5bn of funding to date.
The company forms part of the broader big data and data tools space, which has seen much interest from corporate venture investors, as the GCV Analytics historical bar chart below shows. The number of corporate-backed rounds we have tracked in such enterprises has been in a somewhat downward trend in recent years but the estimated total dollars raised in those rounds have been growing and already reached a peak at $9.65bn by the end of August this year. In fact, through 2021 we have already tracked nearly the same number of deals (120) as for the entire 2020 (123). This seems to indicate there is a clear upward pressure in valuations in this space.
