Databricks just raised a Series G at a huge $28B valuation, hopefully the last round before an IPO this year. The business brought in $425 ARR in 2020 growing at 75% YoY, which puts it as one of the fastest growing $100m+ ARR companies.

CEO Ali Ghodsi mentioned the round was "oversubscribed by 2x and that the company could easily have raised at $35B" according to an interview with Forbes.

I wanted to see how this tracked against $SNOW's fundraising history given they are in adjacent spaces. For the most prat, Databricks and Snowflake have followed similar trajectories and were founded only a year apart. It's incredible to see the pace at which these companies can go from $1B to $10B to $100B.

I'm sure that this latest fundraise benefits from some halo effects of Snowflake's success in the public markets. While the two are not direct competitors, they overlap in some of the use cases around enabling data analytics and data science for the modern enterprise.

I think Snowflake has done a tremendous job painting the narrative around data analytics in particular and I am hoping that Databricks will do the same around AI/ML and open source.

I am working on writing more in-depth about the data infrastructure space, can follow that on Substack: http://nandu.substack.com/