Databricks hits $188B valuation on AI pivot and open model strategy

Databricks on Thursday revealed a new funding round valuing the company at $188 billion, led by Coatue. The exact amount raised is undisclosed but reported at roughly $3 billion, and the round won't close until summer. Unusually, the company announced before receiving the money, but VCs confirm the deal is solid due to overwhelming demand. This marks the latest in a blistering fundraising spree: $10B at $62B in Dec 2024, $1B at $100B in Sept 2025, and $5B at $134B in Feb 2026. The rapid ascent reflects Databricks' successful rebranding from a big-data SaaS relic to an AI powerhouse, with product launches like Lakebase (AI agent database), Unity (AI gateway), and Omnigent (multi-agent manager).

Databricks has also become a poster child for enterprises adopting low-cost Chinese open-weight models, particularly Z.ai's GLM 5.2 for coding. In a recent internal benchmark with 3,000 software engineers, the company found that open models matched proprietary models (Anthropic, OpenAI) on coding difficulty at lower cost. Surprisingly, the choice of agentic coding harness (e.g., Codex, Claude Code, or open-source Pi) equally impacted total cost, with Pi providing the best context management. CEO Ali Ghodsi stressed that model choice alone isn't enough—the harness matters. This AI-first narrative has given Databricks a valuation halo: even Jersey Mike's mentioned AI 22 times in its S-1. The lesson: data platforms that enable secure, cost-efficient AI are the new gold rush.