Much to the dismay of antsy bankers and investors, it doesn’t look like Databricks, which has aided the rise of artificial intelligence software in the business world, will be going public anytime soon.
Instead, the company, which sells tools for building machine-learning models, has been chatting with investors about potentially raising hundreds of millions of dollars, as my colleagues Cory and Amir reported yesterday.
Databricks won’t take any capital at a valuation below $38 billion, the fundraising price it landed during its last equity financing in 2021. That may be a tall order, given the unimpressive stock market performance of its publicly traded competitor, Snowflake, and Databricks’ $380 million operating loss in the fiscal year that ended in January. Databricks’ bottom line has long been a secret and the subject of much speculation in AI circles—until now! To be fair, the company’s finances have improved a lot recently, as the report showed.
