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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

#61

Post by AJRF »

uxcolumbo wrote: post #52

Are there any cheaper alternatives to Databricks, EC2, DynamoDB, S3 solution? Where cost is more predictable and controlled? What's a good roll your own solution? DB storage doesn't need to be dynamic like with DynamoDB. At max 1TB - maybe double in the future. Could this be done on a mid size VPS (32GB RAM) hosting Apache Spark etc - or better to have a couple? P.S. total beginner in this space, hence the (naive) qu…

Depends on how you define cheaper - you could set up Apache Iceberg, Spark, MLFlow, AirFlow, JupyterLab, etc and create an abomination that sort of looks like Databricks if you squint, but then you have to deal with set up, maintenance, support, etc.

Computationally speaking - again depends on what your company does - Collect a lot of data? You need a lot of storage.

Train ML Models, you will need GPUs - and you need to think about how to utilise those GPUs.

Or...you could pay databricks, log in and start working.

I worked at a company who tried to roll their own, and they wasted about a year to do it, and it was flaky as hell and fell apart. Self hosting makes sense if you have the people to manage it, but the vast majority of medium sized companies will have engineers who think they can manage this, try it, fail and move on to another company.

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

#62

Post by jinjin2 »

uxcolumbo wrote: post #52

Are there any cheaper alternatives to Databricks, EC2, DynamoDB, S3 solution? Where cost is more predictable and controlled? What's a good roll your own solution? DB storage doesn't need to be dynamic like with DynamoDB. At max 1TB - maybe double in the future. Could this be done on a mid size VPS (32GB RAM) hosting Apache Spark etc - or better to have a couple? P.S. total beginner in this space, hence the (naive) qu…

Exasol costs us a fraction of what we used to pay for Databricks, and that is even with us serving far more users than we used to do (from a data size perspective we are not at the petabytes scale yet, but getting there).

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

#63

Post by alecco »

> and Lakebase, a new type of operational database (OLTP), built on open source Postgres, and optimized for AI Agents.

Rust + Cloud Object Store/serverless/S3 + Postgres. Slap "AI agents" on top: keyword peak reached. So they will easily raise the 100bn.

Meanwhile, this is Lakebase/Neon: https://blog.opensecret.cloud/why-we-migrated-from-neon-to-p...

Due diligence? Taboo.

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

#64

Post by TuringNYC »

namenotrequired wrote: post #20

Why Databricks would do this (rather than IPO) is obvious. When you can raise privately, it’s way easier than IPO. The real question to me is why the investors (new and previous) are going along with it?

Because it is a better valuation than what they would get in the public markets with an IPO?

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

#65

Post by TuringNYC »

throwawaydbb wrote: post #31
nikolayasdf123 wrote: post #16

wonder what they employees think. will they ever IPO and cashout?

Since this year the employees are vesting RSUs (not options, and also no expiry date) quorterly now, they sell a portion of them (automatically) and pay taxes to the government at each vesting event, as the expiry date no longer exists. For liquidity there are tenders where employees sell their stock privately, so the employees no longer need IPO to cash out. Just to clarify - for many years employees were getting th…

So what happened to employees who had RSUs with expirations that have passed? Do they lose the value? I know my startup stock had 10yr expirations.

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

#66

Post by TuringNYC »

IshKebab wrote: post #38
tormeh wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah I think this is how it usually works, and yeah at $100bn valuation they are now 100% worthless, because investors get paid first, and there's no way they'll get sold or IPO for more than $100bn.

> Yeah I think this is how it usually works, and yeah at $100bn valuation they are now 100% worthless, because investors get paid first, and there's no way they'll get sold or IPO for more than $100bn.

Not quite right? Because the raise-implied valuation doesnt account for preferences. The IPO could be for 50bn and the latest investors could do well given the preference stack of first money outs in later rounds.

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

#67

Post by mackman »

elAhmo wrote: post #27

Regardless 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.

Is this just a case of waiting to stay private while still giving current employees some liquidity?

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

#68

Post by benterix »

e40 wrote: post #51
federiconafria wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even more if you are familiar with their pricing.

This! We did some simple testing on their platform to integrate it into our product for a customer. In a few days of light work rang up a huge bill. Many multiples of what we spend on OpenAI, which gets heavy use.

It does have some good aspects for engineers working with these tools in some cases: https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-accidentally-saved-half-a-...

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

#69

Post by quickthrowman »

alwahi wrote: post #56
ed_elliott_asc wrote: post #6

I 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.

i don't think that it is possible to raise a 100 billion without name dropping ai in every sentence in every meeting you have with a potential investor....

They are not raising $100B, they are raising money at a valuation of $100B.

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

#70

Post by hobs »

AJRF wrote: post #61
uxcolumbo wrote: post #52

Are there any cheaper alternatives to Databricks, EC2, DynamoDB, S3 solution? Where cost is more predictable and controlled? What's a good roll your own solution? DB storage doesn't need to be dynamic like with DynamoDB. At max 1TB - maybe double in the future. Could this be done on a mid size VPS (32GB RAM) hosting Apache Spark etc - or better to have a couple? P.S. total beginner in this space, hence the (naive) qu…

Depends on how you define cheaper - you could set up Apache Iceberg, Spark, MLFlow, AirFlow, JupyterLab, etc and create an abomination that sort of looks like Databricks if you squint, but then you have to deal with set up, maintenance, support, etc. Computationally speaking - again depends on what your company does - Collect a lot of data? You need a lot of storage. Train ML Models, you will need GPUs - and you need…

Don't worry, most places go straight with databricks and get a flaky as hell system that falls apart anyway, but then they can blame databricks instead of their own incompetence.
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