Earlier this week, Databricks, a global data, analytics, and artificial intelligence company founded in 2013 by the original creators of Apache Spark, crossed the $100 billion valuation in a Series K round that was oversubscribed by nearly 20x.
This validates the startup as one of the most valuable private software firms in history. So, when will it go public?
It all started at Berkeley
The roots of Databricks stretch back to UC Berkeley in 2009, when a group of grad students led by Matei Zaharia built Apache Spark to fix a big problem: data processing was slow and clunky. By 2013, Spark’s creators had turned their project into a business. The startup aimed high to make it easier for enterprises to manage and analyse their exploding volumes of data.
Fast forward, and CEO Ali Ghodsi and co-founder Ion Stoica took that foundation and built a platform that caught the attention of major enterprises.
Betting big on the lakehouse
At a time when data lakes and warehouses forced companies to choose between scale and structure, Databricks pushed a new approach: the “lakehouse.”
With Delta Lake, raw storage could be transformed into something reliable enough for production workloads. Developers adopted it freely, then pulled executives toward paid enterprise subscriptions. That bottom-up pattern fueled growth across industries.
Competitors like Snowflake focused on warehousing, Palantir on specific verticals, but Databricks built a flexible, open platform that business users and tech teams could grow into. Plus, their multi-cloud, open-format approach scored big in enterprises wary of lock-in.
Playing the long game on IPO
Having reached $100B in valuation, Databricks is now among the most anticipated listings in enterprise tech. Ghodsi has said the company will wait for the right moment, but secondary sales and near‑profitability mean it can afford patience.
