This fucker Ghodsi will do everything but go public
Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation
91–100 of 214 posts
Re: Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation
#92How is this company worth even 1% of that?
Their product looks like basic wrappers for managing postgres instances and dashboards. Why would anyone with even minimal technical expertise pay for a generic service like that?
Re: Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation
#93It doesn't look like a typical round for raising capital for investments. Instead:
1. Liquidity: Early investors could sell to late-stage investors, since they are not IPO. Their previous round looked like that.
2. Markup: The previous investors can increase their valuation by doing a round again. It also provides a paper valuation for acquiring new companies. That combined with preferred stock (always get 1x back) might be appealing and make some investors more generous on valuation.
Re: Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation
#94Looks like someone is thinking “hey let’s wave our hands in the air and talk about AI and someone will write us a cheque!” as a way to kick the can down the road that this far into it they’re still not selling a product that’s making money. Looks a bit desperate TBH.
Re: Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation
#95I 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?
> who is the typical databricks customer?
The CTO of a "traditional" company who is responsible for "implementing digital transition".
Re: Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation
#96Regardless 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.
They were expecting to be cash flow positive in Jan 2025, according to [0]. That said, it is hard to tell if they actually became cash flow positive since with them still being a private company, they aren't required to release that information. [0]: https://www.databricks.com/company/newsroom/press-releases/d...
Whenever companies release glowing fluff PR about their amazing financials they key word in there is “non-GAAP.”
i.e. when we exclude a bunch of pesky costs and other expenses that are the reason we’re not doing so well, we’re actually doing really well!
Non-GAAP has its place, but if used to say the company is doing well (vs like actual accounting) that’s usually not a good sign. Real healthy companies don’t need to hide behind non-GAAP.
Re: Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
yeah where IT blocks half of the config, and you disable half of the features that could make it great, just to make sure they definitely don't give control to..GASP... A DATA ENGINEER
To be fair, the Data Engineer is probably either a data analyst turned DBA who yearns for the comfort of SQL Server or worse, the lowest bidder.
Re: Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation
#98Looks like someone is thinking “hey let’s wave our hands in the air and talk about AI and someone will write us a cheque!” as a way to kick the can down the road that this far into it they’re still not selling a product that’s making money. Looks a bit desperate TBH.
yep i still don't understand how hosting notebooks and spark ( which btw is ancient big data tech) is worth 100B.
whats so hard about this. i don't get it.
Re: Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
for what? managed postgres and some ml training tools?
because it's recommended by nearly all consultants and Microsoft. Simple as that, it's consulting Heaven. Much like SAS and SAP. Everybody happy. Now to be far to databricks, if used properly and ignore the cost, it does actually function pretty well. Compared to Synapse, PowerBI Tabular, Fabric, Azure ML, ... that's already a big big big step forward.
Databricks is janky, but so much better than the Azure services for data.
If you're buying from microsoft, it won't be cheap either way, might as well treat yourself a little bit.
Re: Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation
#100It will be a nice discount acquihire for Microsoft in a few years.
Databricks on azure is huge. I've heard that in some Azure regions, over 70% of the compute usage is just Databricks. So there is definitely an incentive for MS to acquire them.
Except that Microsoft looks better if you have the illusion of choice. Azure Databricks or Azure Databricks but you have to build it yourself out of janky azure services