Databricks is closing a new funding round at a valuation of one hundred billion dollars, sources have confirmed. The round was originally reported by the Wall Street Journal. A source familiar with the deal states the new round is approximately one billion dollars and was wildly oversubscribed. Databricks, best known for its data analytics products, refrained from selling more equity because it did not require additional cash for operations following its record-breaking ten billion dollar raise at a sixty-two billion dollar valuation last January. OpenAI has since broken that record with a forty billion dollar raise in March.
The new round was co-led by Thrive and one of Databricks’ early investors, Insight Partners. These two firms also led the previous round. The company has now raised approximately twenty billion dollars since its founding in 2013.
This was a primary round, meaning it did not include employees selling their shares. However, sources close to the company say Databricks has already held two secondary rounds for employees in 2025. Those offers allowed employees to sell up to forty, fifty, or sixty percent of their shares, depending on the size of their holdings. In both cases, the full funds available for the secondary round were not maxed out, meaning employees held on to more shares than they could have sold. While Databricks is clearly not in a hurry to IPO, employees have had two recent chances to cash out shares.
This new round was raised to pursue two specific projects, a database for AI agents and its AI agent platform, according to Databricks co-founder and CEO Ali Ghodsi. The company will invest heavily in its database for AI agents, making it generally available to all customers. The product, known as Lakebase, launched in June at the company’s annual tech conference. Lakebase is based on the open source database Postgres, is enterprise grade, and supports corporate developers’ vibe-coding projects, making it a competitor to Supabase.
Ghodsi stated the database market represents a one hundred five billion dollar total addressable market that has remained largely unaffected for the last forty years. He revealed an interesting statistic, noting that a year ago thirty percent of databases were created by AI agents instead of humans, and that figure has now risen to eighty percent. He predicts it will increase to ninety-nine percent of new databases within a year. He believes the new user is not human but an AI agent, and focusing on that user persona is the key to disrupting the market.
Regarding how Lakebase will differentiate from competitors like Supabase, Ghodsi said the key is separated compute and storage. By untying expensive compute from lower-cost storage, Databricks can affordably let users create many databases without going bankrupt, as AI agents spin them up much faster than humans can.
The second project Databricks will invest in is its AI agent platform, Agent Bricks, also launched in June. Ghodsi said that while everyone is focused on superintelligence, organizations do not need that. Instead, they need agents that can reliably handle mundane tasks unaided, like onboarding employees or answering personalized questions about HR benefits. He believes that focus represents a much bigger opportunity for worldwide GDP and organizations and will give Agent Bricks a competitive advantage.
He also stated the extra cash will allow Databricks to compete in the expensive AI talent poaching wars, as it is very costly to hire AI talent right now.