The artificial intelligence start-up’s funding shows investors remain enthusiastic about the A.I. boom.
In October, OpenAI, the start-up behind ChatGPT, raised one of the largest rounds of venture capital, bringing in $6.5 billion.
On Tuesday, another artificial intelligence start-up, Databricks, announced an even bigger haul: It is set to collect $10 billion in a new funding round, which would value the company at $62 billion.
The record fundings show that two years into an A.I. boom, investor enthusiasm for the technology has not waned. In recent months, some A.I. start-ups have struggled to find their footing and been sold or folded into larger companies. Even the fastest-growing companies are burning enormous sums of cash. OpenAI recently told investors that it expected to lose $5 billion this year on $3.7 billion in sales.
Investors remain bullish. Databricks, which was founded in 2013 and provides software tools for storing and analyzing large amounts of online data, said it expected in January to have more than $3 billion of “revenue run rate,” or monthly revenue extrapolated for a full year. It has morphed into an A.I. company in recent years, helping businesses build and operate the kind of software that drives chatbots and similar A.I. services.
The San Francisco-based company also said it expected to have a “positive free cash flow” for the three months ending Jan. 31, a sign that its income was mostly outpacing its spending. The company sells its products to more than 10,000 customers, including Shell and Comcast. More than 500 customers are on a pace to pay Databricks over $1 million a year for its offerings, the company said.
At a valuation of $62 billion, Databricks would surpass the market capitalization of its main competitor, Snowflake, which is publicly traded.
