Nvidia AI partner Databricks raises $500M to achieve $43B valuation

Capital One also joined the investment round, despite being the top client of rival cloud platform Snowflake.

Cloud data company Databricks recently announced the completion of a Series I fundraising round where it raked in $500 million from primary investor accounts led by T. Rowe and new investors Capital One Ventures, Ghisallo Capital Management, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan and Nvidia.

The latest investment round was achieved at a valuation of $43 billion dollars and a share price of $73.50, according to Databricks. In 2021, the company raised $1.6 billion in Series H funding at a valuation of $38 billion.

Databricks’ financial partnership with Nvidia indicates an increased synergy between the two artificial intelligence (AI) corporations, with generative AI for enterprise data being the primary driver for the raise.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, per a Databricks press release, called enterprise data “a goldmine for generative AI,” adding, “Databricks is doing incredible work with Nvidia technology to accelerate data processing and generative AI models.”

Databricks’ most prominent product is its “Lakehouse” platform. Lakehouse essentially combines a data warehouse with a data lake for seamless developer workflow access.

Per the company’s press release:

“The Databricks Lakehouse unifies data, analytics and AI on a single platform so that customers can govern, manage and derive insights from enterprise data and build their own generative AI solutions faster.”

Lakehouse empowers enterprise clients to build out their own generative AI models — sort of like a ChatGPT-style AI system that’s trained only on a client’s internal data. This architecture puts privacy controls in the purview of the business client and allows enterprises to fine-tune models in order to inhibit unwanted or erroneous outputs.

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At a valuation of $43 billion, Databricks is one of the highest-valued artificial intelligence companies existing in the United States — trillion-dollar competitors such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Cloud and Google Cloud notwithstanding.

Its chief competitor, Snowflake, has a market value of approximately $51 billion. It’s worth noting that Capital One, one of the firms investing in the latest Databricks funding round, is among Snowflake’s largest corporate clients.