Databricks officially valued at $38 billion following latest funding round

Databricks has officially completed its $1.6 billion round of funding, reaching a $38 billion post-money valuation.

According to the company, the funds will be used to continue to accelerate innovation and adoption of the data lakehouse, as data architectures grow in popularity across data-driven organisations.

The Series H funding was led by Counterpoint Global (Morgan Stanley). The company was joined by other new investors including Baillie Gifford, ClearBridge Investments and UC Investments.

Existing investors participating in the round include Andreessen Horowitz, funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments), Coatue Management, Fidelity Management - Research, Franklin Templeton, GIC, Greenoaks, Octahedron Capital, funds and accounts managed by T. Rowe Price Associates, Tiger Global Management and Whale Rock Capital Management.

As further commitment to accelerate lakehouse adoption globally, Databricks also announced the appointment of former Salesforce executive, Andy Kofoid, as president of global field operations.

As the world's first lakehouse platform in the cloud, Databricks pioneered an open and unified architecture for data and AI. This brings reliability, governance and performance of a data warehouse directly to the data lakes that most organisations already store all of their data in, the company states.

Rather than being forced to move data out of the data lake, and between various disconnected and legacy systems for different use cases, Databricks customers are building lakehouses on AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud to support every data and analytics workload on a single platform, according to the company.

As a result, they're able to avoid architectural complexity, reduce infrastructure costs, increase data team productivity, and innovate faster.

Moving forward, the company states it intends to invest in innovations that further simplify AI, preserve choice and flexibility across all major public clouds, and establish the lakehouse as a modern replacement to the legacy data warehouse.

These activities are driven by open standards, cloud adoption and the continued rise of machine learning applications, Databricks states.

In addition, under Kofoid's leadership, the company will invest to accelerate adoption of the Databricks Lakehouse Platform globally, by entering new markets, enabling and growing its partner ecosystem, and building a broad catalog of industry solutions.

Databricks cofounder and CEO Ali Ghodsi says, "This new investment is a reflection of the rapid adoption and incredible customer demand were seeing for the Databricks Lakehouse Platform and underscores the industry and investor confidence in our vision - that lakehouse is the data architecture of the future.

"This marks a thrilling new chapter that will allow us to accelerate our pace of innovation and further invest in the success of data-driven organisations on their journey to the lakehouse.

Counterpoint Global head Dennis Lynch says, "We're incredibly excited to partner with the world class team at Databricks whose lakehouse platform is reinventing analytics with the speed and scale customers require today.

"We believe the company is well positioned to become a platform of choice among forward thinking enterprises that want to transform valuable data into strategic business insights.

Other existing and new investors that participated in this funding round include: Alta Park Capital, a suite of BNY Mellon funds, Discovery Capital, Dragoneer Investment Group, Flucas Ventures, Gaingels, Geodesic, Green Bay Ventures, the House Fund, Insight Partners and New Enterprise Associates.