Databricks hits $188B valuation, extending its run as AI’s favourite second act

Databricks on Thursday introduced a brand new spherical of funding that values the corporate at $188 billion. The spherical was led by Coatue.

Databricks didn’t disclose precisely how a lot it raised; it stated the cash isn’t in its palms but and that the spherical will shut later on this summer season. (Different shops have since reported the elevate is roughly $3 billion.) Whereas it’s uncommon for a corporation to announce earlier than it will get the cash, a VC tells TechCrunch that the deal is strong, with so many companies wanting in that the corporate had no cause to maintain its shiny new valuation a secret.

The truth is, Databricks has been on a year-and-a-half fundraising tear because it efficiently transitioned its picture into an AI supplier and never only a yesteryear SaaS sensation. Yesteryear being again within the BC occasions (Earlier than ChatGPT).

Solely 5 months in the past, in February, Databricks closed a $5 billion Collection L elevate at a $134 billion valuation. 5 months earlier than that, in September 2025, it raised $1B at $100 billion valuation. And roughly 9 months earlier than that, in December 2024, it raised what was a record-breaking round at the time of $10 billion at a $62 billion valuation.

Databricks has raised so many rounds through the years that this newest one turned the topic of memes about running out of letters of the alphabet. “Turning on alerts for once we get a Collection AA,” one individual posted.

However its picture reconstruction has been legit. Based in 2013, it initially grew to success again within the large information period, with software program that enabled enterprises to retailer huge quantities of knowledge within the cloud, but produce speedy analytics.

As a result of it already sat on troves of enterprise information, Databricks was then well-positioned to reply as corporations began wanting AI with the identical safety and governance they count on from conventional enterprise software program.

The corporate started rolling out one AI product after one other, like Lakebase, its database built for AI agents, and Unity, its AI gateway, together with a “meta-harness” referred to as Omnigent that manages a number of brokers.

Databricks additionally more and more became known as one of many large examples of enterprises adopting extra reasonably priced Chinese language-based open-weight fashions (fashions whose underlying code is revealed for anybody to make use of and modify) for value management, one of the big trends of 2026. It’s a specific champion of Z.ai’s GLM 5.2 as a mannequin for coding.

Final week Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi shared the results of some inner benchmarking executed to handle his personal AI prices for his 3,000 software program engineers.

The corporate in contrast AI fashions on the precise duties its programmers do. Not surprisingly, in the blog post revealing the results, Databricks shared that “open fashions, and GLM 5.2 particularly, at the moment are in a position to deal with even the very best degree of process issue” in coding, and at a complete decrease value than proprietary fashions from Anthropic and OpenAI.

But it surely did shock individuals by discovering that the selection of harness — the agentic coding instrument, like Codex or Claude Code, that wraps round a mannequin and manages its context and directions — equally impacted prices. It discovered that open-source harness Pi to be among the best at managing context surrounding every immediate, and due to this fact one of many lowest prices decisions with out sacrificing high quality.

“The lesson right here isn’t that one harness is at all times cheaper or that native harnesses are worse,” the post declared. “As a substitute, mannequin alternative is just one piece of the puzzle.”

All of this has added to Databricks picture as an AI firm, even when it wasn’t based as an AI lab. This, in flip, has granted it the AI-halo for elevating cash and leaping its valuation. As we beforehand reported, the AI impact is so sturdy lately, that even sandwich shop Jersey Mike’s mentioned AI 22 occasions in its S-1 paperwork.