Ali Ghodsi, Co-Founder and CEO of Databricks Inc., speaks during a television interview for Bloomberg Technology in San Francisco, California, United States on Tuesday, October 22, 2019.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Databricks, a start-up whose software helps companies process large amounts of data quickly and prepare it for analysis, announced Monday that it had raised $ 1 billion in fresh money, including from some prominent corporate investors.
Amazon Web Services, Alphabet’s CapitalG Venture Arm, and Salesforce Ventures have joined, according to a statement. Microsoft, which had previously invested in Databricks, is also participating in the new round, the statement said.
The $ 28 billion transaction for Databricks shows that the top three US cloud providers are realizing the company represents a similar opportunity to Snowflake, another cloud software company, is managing the company Data supported.
Databricks became famous for helping companies implement a version of Apache Spark, an alternative to Hadoop technology for storing many different types of data in bulk. It can help cleanse data for exploration in data visualization software like Salesforce’s own Tableau. Databricks software provides companies with an easy way to run this type of software without worrying about configuration and updating. Databricks is also increasingly helping companies provide models for artificial intelligence.
“We are 100 percent cloud-native,” said Ali Ghodsi, CEO of Databricks, to CNBC in an interview in 2019. The same principle applies to Snowflake, in which Salesforce also invested and that after going public last year has seen strong sales growth.
Amazon, the largest cloud provider, did not invest any money in Snowflake before going public. Investments will now be made in Databricks at a later date than before.
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