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

Databricks connected Thursday announced a caller circular of backing that values the institution astatine $188 billion. The circular was led by Coatue.

Databricks didn’t disclose precisely however overmuch it raised; it said the wealth isn’t successful its hands yet and that the circular volition adjacent aboriginal successful this summer. (Other outlets person since reported the rise is astir $3 billion.) While it’s antithetic for a institution to denote earlier it gets the money, a VC tells TechCrunch that the woody is solid, with truthful galore firms wanting successful that the institution had nary crushed to support its shiny caller valuation a secret.

In fact, Databricks has been connected a year-and-a-half fundraising teardrop arsenic it successfully transitioned its representation into an AI supplier and not conscionable a yesteryear SaaS sensation. Yesteryear being backmost successful the BC times (Before ChatGPT).

Only 5 months ago, successful February, Databricks closed a $5 cardinal Series L raise at a $134 cardinal valuation. Five months earlier that, successful September 2025, it raised $1B astatine $100 cardinal valuation. And astir 9 months earlier that, successful December 2024, it raised what was a record-breaking circular astatine the clip of $10 billion astatine a $62 cardinal valuation.

Databricks has raised truthful galore rounds implicit the years that this latest 1 became the taxable of memes astir moving retired of letters of the alphabet. “Turning connected alerts for erstwhile we get a Series AA,” 1 idiosyncratic posted.

But its representation reconstruction has been legit. Founded successful 2013, it initially grew to occurrence backmost successful the large information era, with bundle that enabled enterprises to store tremendous amounts of information successful the cloud, yet nutrient speedy analytics.

Because it already sat connected troves of endeavor data, Databricks was past well-positioned to respond arsenic companies started wanting AI with the aforesaid information and governance they expect from accepted endeavor software.

The institution began rolling retired 1 AI merchandise aft another, similar Lakebase, its database built for AI agents, and Unity, its AI gateway, on with a “meta-harness” called Omnigent that manages aggregate agents.

Databricks besides progressively became known arsenic 1 of the large examples of enterprises adopting much affordable Chinese-based open-weight models (models whose underlying codification is published for anyone to usage and modify) for outgo control, one of the large trends of 2026. It is simply a peculiar champion of Z.ai’s GLM 5.2 arsenic a exemplary for coding.

Last week Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi shared the results of immoderate interior benchmarking done to negociate his ain AI costs for his 3,000 bundle engineers.

The institution compared AI models connected the existent tasks its programmers do. Not surprisingly, in the blog station revealing the results, Databricks shared that “open models, and GLM 5.2 successful particular, are present capable to grip adjacent the highest level of task difficulty” successful coding, and astatine a full little outgo than proprietary models from Anthropic and OpenAI.

But it did astonishment radical by uncovering that the prime of harness — the agentic coding tool, similar Codex oregon Claude Code, that wraps astir a exemplary and manages its discourse and instructions — arsenic impacted costs. It recovered that open-source harness, Pi, to beryllium 1 of the champion astatine managing discourse surrounding each prompt, and truthful 1 of the lowest costs choices without sacrificing quality.

“The acquisition present isn’t that 1 harness is ever cheaper oregon that autochthonal harnesses are worse. Instead, exemplary prime is lone 1 portion of the puzzle,” the post declared.

All of this has added to Databricks representation arsenic an AI company, adjacent if it wasn’t founded arsenic an AI lab. This, successful turn, has granted it the AI-halo for raising wealth and leaping its valuation. As we antecedently reported, the AI effect is truthful beardown these days, that adjacent sandwich store Jersey Mike’s mentioned AI 22 times successful its S-1 documents.