wonder what they employees think. will they ever IPO and cashout?
If their options haven't converted to stock yet, it's not looking good. This is the sort of shenanigans that demand a strike. And ideally regulation.
Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation
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Re: Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The private market is getting out of hand, then. I think it makes sense for private companies beyond a certain size to have the same reporting requirements that listed ones do. At these valuations the private market for startups is becoming systemically important.
Re: Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation
#23Prediction for 2026 - investors will be shitting bricks.
Re: Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation
#24wonder what they employees think. will they ever IPO and cashout?
If their options haven't converted to stock yet, it's not looking good. This is the sort of shenanigans that demand a strike. And ideally regulation.
Options can a significant portion of sign on bonus but they typically vest over several years so I guess they are hoping for an IPO eventually. IMHO Databricks will be overtaken by "events" including AI disillusionment, broader open source tools and broader education across the workforce. So the eventual IPO will not happen.
Re: Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation
#25What’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…
This heavily depends on share classes and preferences. Surely the new investor wants better terms. The issue isn't so much dilution as a preference but added risk of never even getting a payout at all.
Re: Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation
#26I can’t help feeling it is the first major misstep from databricks , they are raising the money for their hosted Postgres and ai platform. Ai is not far away from dropping to the “trough of disillusionment” and I can’t see why databricks even needs Postgres. Hopefully I’m wrong as I’m a big fan of databricks.
Definitely seem like bad investments from my perspective on databricks.
Databricks is great at offering a "distributed spark/kubernetes in a box" platform. But its AI integration is one of the least helpful I've experienced. It's very interuptive to a workflow, and very rarely offers genuinely useful help. Most users I've seen turn it off, something databricks must be aware of because they require admins permission for users to opt out of AI.
I don't mean to rant, there's lots that is useful in databricks, but it doesn't seem like this funding round is targeting any of that.
Re: Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation
#27Regardless of the product and idea they had, a company that is 15 years old and raised 10+ billion dollars still needing to raise money after all this time is ridiculous.
Not being sustainable after all this time and billions of dollars is a sign company is just burning money, and a lot of it. wework vibes.
Re: Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
If their options haven't converted to stock yet, it's not looking good. This is the sort of shenanigans that demand a strike. And ideally regulation.
Options can a significant portion of sign on bonus but they typically vest over several years so I guess they are hoping for an IPO eventually. IMHO Databricks will be overtaken by "events" including AI disillusionment, broader open source tools and broader education across the workforce. So the eventual IPO will not happen.
Depends. Some options only vest in the case of an "exit event", i.e. an acquisition or an IPO. At this point I would assume such options are borderline worthless.
Re: Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation
#29I 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?
I think that's the main offering of databricks- you get a "data platforn in a box" and navigating the forest of piecemeal solutions is replaced with telling your data science and analytics teams to "use databricks".
It's easy to look on knowing lots about data tools and say "this could be better done with open source tools for a fraction of the cost", but if you're not a big tech company, hiring a team to manage your data platform for 5 analysts is probably a lot more expensive than just buying databricks.
Re: Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation
#30I 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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