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Databricks

Last Updated November 24, 2025

Databricks provides a unified Data Intelligence Platform built on the “lakehouse” architecture, combining the flexibility of data lakes with the performance and governance of data warehouses and the AI tooling required to build and deploy models at scale. The platform centralizes data engineering, analytics, machine learning, and generative AI on one foundation, enabling 15,000+ organizations (including well over 60% of the Fortune 500) to run batch and streaming pipelines, BI workloads, and AI agents against a single, governed copy of their data.
Company Overview: Databricks
Databricks has reached a rare combination of scale and growth: roughly $4 billion in annual recurring revenue with year-over-year growth still above 50%, while maintaining free-cash-flow positivity and non-GAAP subscription gross margins above 80%. It is the category leader in the lakehouse segment it helped create, with more than 15,000 customers and net revenue retention above 140%, indicating strong expansion inside existing accounts. Strategically, Databricks is moving from analytics into full data + AI infrastructure: transactional workloads (Lakebase), AI agents (Agent Bricks), and governance (Unity Catalog) all sit on top of the same lakehouse core. Backed by Microsoft, AWS, Nvidia and top-tier growth funds, and widely regarded as a pre-IPO candidate, the company’s trajectory positions it as a potential defining infrastructure vendor for the AI era.
Investment Highlights

Category Leadership: Pioneer and clear leader in the lakehouse architecture that unifies data lakes, warehouses, and AI workflows on a single platform.

Scale + Growth: Exceeded $4B annual recurring revenue in 2025 with >50% year-over-year growth, while generating positive free cash flow.

Customer Base: 15,000+ organizations worldwide and well over 60% of the Fortune 500; more than 650 customers reportedly spend over $1M annually.

Customer Economics: Net revenue retention above 140% and non-GAAP subscription gross margins above 80%, signaling strong expansion and unit economics.

AI Momentum: AI and machine-learning products are at >$1B annualized run-rate, validating Databricks as more than a traditional analytics vendor.

Unified Platform Moat: Once data, governance, and AI workflows are consolidated into the lakehouse, switching to alternatives is complex and costly, creating durable lock-in.

Valuation Trajectory: Valuation rose from ~$43B (2023) to ~$62B (early 2025) to >$100B following a $1B round later in 2025, with ongoing discussions reported around a $130B+ mark.

Open Ecosystem: Deep open-source roots (Apache Spark, Delta Lake, MLflow) and support for multi-cloud deployments across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.

Enterprise AI Positioning: Platform is increasingly framed as an “operating system” for enterprise data and AI, supporting LLMs, agents, and governed AI workloads.

Product & Technology Leadership

Lakehouse Platform: Core architecture that combines data lake storage with data warehouse performance and AI tooling. Supports batch and streaming ingestion, ETL, analytics, ML training, and generative AI on a single data foundation.

Lakebase (Transactional Engine): A Postgres-compatible, serverless engine built on the lakehouse to support transactional and operational workloads, extending Databricks beyond analytics into real-time application backends.

Databricks SQL: High-performance SQL engine for BI and reporting directly on lakehouse data, giving warehouse-style performance without moving data into a separate warehouse product.

Unity Catalog: Central governance layer for data, models, and AI assets. Provides fine-grained access control, unified metadata, lineage tracking, and auditability across all workloads—critical for regulated enterprises.

MLflow + Machine Learning: End-to-end ML lifecycle management: experiment tracking, model registry, deployment, and monitoring. Deeply integrated with Databricks compute to streamline enterprise MLOps.

Generative AI & Agents (Agent Bricks): Framework to build, deploy, and manage AI agents that connect to enterprise data and tools. Designed for production deployment of LLM-powered applications with observability and governance.

Lakeflow & No-Code Data Tools: Visual data pipeline and workflow tooling for non-specialists, enabling analysts and operations teams to build data flows without deep engineering expertise.

Delta Lake & Delta Sharing: Open storage format and sharing protocol that support ACID transactions on data lakes and cross-organization data collaboration without copying data.

Data Clean Rooms: Privacy-preserving collaboration environments that allow multiple parties to run analytics or AI workloads over combined datasets while maintaining strict data access controls.

 Market Position & Strategic Advantage

Core Market: Unified data and AI infrastructure—spanning data lakes, warehouses, analytics, ML, and generative AI—positioning Databricks as a foundational layer for enterprise AI initiatives.

Customer Footprint: More than 15,000 organizations globally and a footprint in well over 60% of the Fortune 500, including large customers in financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, retail, and public sector.

Use Cases: Modern BI and reporting, real-time analytics, feature stores, model training, RAG pipelines, AI agents, fraud detection, supply chain optimization, and personalization workloads.

Competitive Landscape: Principal competitors include Snowflake (cloud data platform), cloud-native services from AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, and point-solution ML/AI platforms. Databricks differentiates via the lakehouse architecture and multi-cloud, open-source positioning.

Go-to-Market: Direct enterprise sales motion supplemented by deep partnerships with cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP) and system integrators. Co-sell motions with Microsoft and AWS are important distribution channels.

Strategic Direction: Evolving from analytics-first to “data + AI operating system” for enterprises by expanding into transactional workloads (Lakebase), AI agents (Agent Bricks), and advanced governance (Unity Catalog).

Geographic Expansion: Significant growth focus in Europe and high-growth markets such as India, where Databricks is investing in local teams and ecosystem development.

Financial Opportunity

Revenue Scale: Databricks surpassed $4B in annualized revenue in 2025, with reports of roughly 50% year-over-year growth at that scale—placing it among the fastest-growing large software companies globally.

Growth Profile: Revenue grew from roughly $1.6B in FY2024 to a $4B run-rate in about 18 months, driven by both new logo wins and expansion within existing customers.

Profitability: The company has reported positive free cash flow while sustaining high growth, alongside non-GAAP subscription gross margins above 80%.

Customer Expansion: Net revenue retention above 140% indicates substantial upsell and cross-sell into the installed base as organizations move more workloads to the lakehouse.

Valuation Path: Valuation has increased from ~$43B (2023) to ~$62B (early 2025) and then to >$100B following a $1B round later in 2025, with reports of ongoing discussions at $130B+ levels.

AI Revenue Contribution: AI-related products and workloads are now contributing more than $1B in annualized revenue, validating Databricks’ positioning as a key AI infrastructure platform rather than only an analytics provider.

Total Addressable Market: The combined data platform, analytics, and AI infrastructure market is widely estimated to be in the hundreds of billions of dollars, with Databricks well-placed as a leading independent platform vendor.

Exit Optionality: At current scale and growth, Databricks is broadly viewed as IPO-ready, with the option to pursue a large public listing when market conditions are favorable.

Company Snapshot

Company: Databricks

Tagline: Unified Data Intelligence Platform

Founded: 2013

Headquarters: San Francisco, California

Founders: Ali Ghodsi, Matei Zaharia, Reynold Xin, Ion Stoica, Patrick Wendell, Andy Konwinski

Employees: 7,000+ (global, 2025)

CNBC Disruptor 50 (2025): #3

Core Focus: Unified lakehouse platform for data engineering, analytics, machine learning, and enterprise AI

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About Databricks

The Databricks platform integrates storage, compute, and collaborative tooling for building data pipelines, analyzing large datasets, and developing machine learning models. Workflows include ingestion, transformation, feature engineering, and model operations, supported by notebooks, jobs, and governance features designed to standardize access and lineage.

Data preparation capabilities address integration, quality, and transformation steps required to ready data for analysis. For data science teams, the platform supports popular libraries and frameworks to train and evaluate models at scale. Visualization and query tools provide access for analysts and business users to explore data under role-based controls.

Operational features include workload orchestration, monitoring, cost management, and security controls aligned to enterprise requirements. The platform’s lakehouse architecture is designed to consolidate analytics and machine learning on a single system while integrating with external data sources and BI applications.

This profile is based on publicly available information and is provided for informational purposes only. Summit Ventures is not affiliated with Databricks and does not offer or recommend securities; Summit Ventures facilitates introductions through a network of partners.