Databricks just closed a Series L north of $4B, announced Dec 16, 2025, and that number is supposed to feel loud. It should. This is what happens when a company built by the original architects of Apache Spark decides it is done explaining itself. Founded in 2013 by Ali Ghodsi, Matei Zaharia, Reynold Xin, Patrick Wendell, Ion Stoica, Andy Konwinski, and Arsalan Tavakoli-Shiraji, Databricks did not crawl out of a pitch deck. It came out of UC Berkeley AMPLab with a research paper, an open source engine, and a very clear opinion about how data was supposed to move.
The round was led by Insight Partners, Fidelity Management & Research Company, and J.P. Morgan Asset Management, with Andreessen Horowitz, BlackRock, Blackstone, Coatue, GIC, MGX, NEA, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, Robinhood Ventures, T. Rowe Price Associates, Temasek, Thrive Capital, and Winslow Capital all leaning in. Post-money valuation lands at $134B. Total capital raised now clears $23B when you include the mostly non-dilutive $10B Series J. This is not survival capital. This is balance-sheet gravity and long overdue liquidity for the people who showed up early and stayed.
The operating metrics justify the volume. More than 55% YoY growth, over $4.8B in ARR, and AI products alone crossing $1B annualized. Over 12,000 customers globally, with 700+ spending north of $1M a year, and net revenue retention above 140%. Financial services, healthcare, retail, manufacturing, public sector. AT&T, Shell, Adobe, Condé Nast, Regeneron, Block, Comcast, Rivian. This is infrastructure that survives procurement, compliance, and real workloads without needing a hype translator.
Product wise, Databricks stopped acting like a data company and started behaving like an intelligence platform. The Data Intelligence Platform ties together Unity Catalog, Databricks SQL, Mosaic AI, Agent Bricks, and Lakebase, the serverless Postgres layer strengthened by the Neon acquisition. Delta Lake and Iceberg finally shake hands through Tabular. Analytics, AI, and governance stop living in separate zip codes and start sharing context. Data used to answer questions. Now it makes decisions and knows who is allowed to watch.
Leadership matters when scale shows up. Ali Ghodsi as CEO, Matei Zaharia as CTO, Reynold Xin as Chief Architect, and Ion Stoica as Executive Chairman built a bench that understands research depth and enterprise consequence. Dave Conte keeps the numbers honest, Ron Gabrisko drives revenue, Rick Schultz frames the narrative, and the board includes Ben Horowitz, Elena Donio, and Peter Sonsini. The Series L fuels Agent Bricks, Lakebase, expansion across Europe and APJ, and continued M&A. Databricks is not chasing the AI wave. It is pouring the concrete under it and letting the rest of the market decide whether to build or swim.
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