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Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation

databricks.com

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Re: Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation

#11

What’s the obvious rationale for going through the whole alphabet of funding rounds, instead of going public / IPO after «the usual» number of raising money. Wouldn’t the current strategy result in some serious stock dilution for the early investors?

Because they don't want the public market to put a real valuation on the company, when they can still raise money with a made up valuation.

Re: Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation

#12

What’s the obvious rationale for going through the whole alphabet of funding rounds, instead of going public / IPO after «the usual» number of raising money. Wouldn’t the current strategy result in some serious stock dilution for the early investors?

An order of magnitude less scrutiny, but also an order of magnitude in size of investor base. The private markets trade at Palantir levels so why go public. Also the private markets are now routinely doing secondary transactions so even less reason to go public.

Re: Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation

#13

What’s the obvious rationale for going through the whole alphabet of funding rounds, instead of going public / IPO after «the usual» number of raising money. Wouldn’t the current strategy result in some serious stock dilution for the early investors?

Stock dilution doesn't work like that. If a seed investor invests for 5% at a $10mil valuation, and the company goes 10x (ie. a valuation of $100mil), if the company now raises a $100mil Series K, that means the Series K investor owns 50% of the company, and the seed investor got diluted down to 2.5%. However, the new valuation of the company is now $200mil with the cash that the new investor brought in, effectively making the seed investor's investment worth the same.

It's a smaller piece of a bigger pie.

To answer your question, the right question to ask is why go public when you can remain private? Public means more paperwork, more legalese, more scrutiny, and less control for the founder, and all of that only to get a bit more liquidity for your stock. If you can remain private, there really isn't much of a reason to not do that.

Re: Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation

#17
post #13

What’s the obvious rationale for going through the whole alphabet of funding rounds, instead of going public / IPO after «the usual» number of raising money. Wouldn’t the current strategy result in some serious stock dilution for the early investors?

Stock dilution doesn't work like that. If a seed investor invests for 5% at a $10mil valuation, and the company goes 10x (ie. a valuation of $100mil), if the company now raises a $100mil Series K, that means the Series K investor owns 50% of the company, and the seed investor got diluted down to 2.5%. However, the new valuation of the company is now $200mil with the cash that the new investor brought in, effectively…

An IPO means selling a whole bunch of people, whereas fundraising rounds pre-IPO mean courting a small number of large investors. I think it's partly a sign of the times that there's enough concentrated capital that you can get enough money from private hands to not need to go the IPO route yet.

Re: Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation

#18
post #13

What’s the obvious rationale for going through the whole alphabet of funding rounds, instead of going public / IPO after «the usual» number of raising money. Wouldn’t the current strategy result in some serious stock dilution for the early investors?

Stock dilution doesn't work like that. If a seed investor invests for 5% at a $10mil valuation, and the company goes 10x (ie. a valuation of $100mil), if the company now raises a $100mil Series K, that means the Series K investor owns 50% of the company, and the seed investor got diluted down to 2.5%. However, the new valuation of the company is now $200mil with the cash that the new investor brought in, effectively…

> If you can remain private, there really isn't much of a reason to not do that.

With the exception of founders it's better for literally everybody else, more scrutiny, more pressure on c-corp, more liquidity, etc.

Re: Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation

#19
I always struggled to understand how do you make a company adopt a platform like databricks to « manage data » isnt managing data a minefield with plenty of open source pieces of software that serve different purposes ? who is the typical databricks customer?
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