Databricks has been confirmed by TechCrunch that it is in the process of closing a new round at a $100 billion valuation. The round was originally reported by the Wall Street Journal.
Sources familiar with the deal only tell TechCrunch that the new round is around $1 billion and is being extremely oversubscribed. Databricks, best known for its data analytics products, declined to sell more shares as it didn’t require cash to operate after recording a $10 billion salary increase in January at a $10 billion valuation. (Openai then crushed its records in March with a $40 billion salary increase.)
The round was once co-led by one of Thrive and Databricks’ early investors, learned by Insight Partners and TechCrunch, one of The Tabricks’ early investors. These two companies also led the final round. The company has now raised approximately $20 billion since its establishment in 2013.
This was a major round. This means that it was not included in the sale of the stock of employees. However, sources close to the company say Databricks already had two rounds for its employees in 2025. These offers allowed employees to sell up to 40%, 50%, or 60% of their shares, depending on the size of their holdings.
In both cases, the full funds available in the secondary round are not the largest, meaning employees are holding more shares than they could sell. Databricks clearly isn’t in a hurry to get an IPO, but employees have two recent opportunities to win stock.
However, this new round was raised to pursue two specific projects, a database for AI agents and its AI agent platforms. Databricks co-founder and CEO Ali Ghodsi spoke to TechCrunch in an interview.
The company invests heavily in databases for AI agents, making them generally available to all customers. In June, a product known as Lake Base was launched at the annual Tech Conference. Based on the open source database Postgres, Lakebase is enterprise grade and supports corporate developer atmosphere code projects. This will become a contender for Supabase.
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“The database market is $100 billion TAM [total addressable market]Ghodsi spoke to TechCrunch and gave a subtle nod to the way database giant Oracle has been locked into the market for decades.
“Here’s an interesting statistic that no one pays attention to. A year ago, I saw in the data that 30% of the database was not created by humans. It was the first time it was created by an AI agent. This year, the statistics are 80%,” he said.
“We have a new user. The user is not human. It’s an AI agent and if it’s doubled just by successfully completing that user’s persona, it’s a wedge to destroy that TAM,” he said.
As for how Lakebase distinguishes itself from how Supabase and others already build post-gress-based databases for agents, Keodsi said the key is “separated calculations and storage.”
By removing expensive calculations from low-cost storage, DataBricks can enable users to create many databases. “Because these agents are so fast. They’re much faster than humans and just spin up a lot of databases, but you don’t want to go bankrupt because you’re doing it,” he explained.
The second project, Databricks, will invest heavily in the IS AI Agent Platform Agent Brick, which was launched in June. “Everyone is very focused on ultra-intelligence,” Ghodsi said. “But that’s not what an organization needs.”
Rather than artificial common mathematics geniuses or cancer aid scientists, what companies need is agents who can handle uncooperative, mediocre tasks that can be addressed with certainty, such as onboarding employees and answering personalized questions about the benefits of HR.
“In fact, I think it’s a much bigger opportunity for global GDP and for the organization,” he said. He believes that such a focus gives Agent Brick a competitive advantage.
He also raised extra cash so that Databricks could enter the AI poaching war. “You know, hiring AI talents is pretty expensive right now,” he said with a smile.
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