Databricks signs term sheet at $188 billion valuation

Databricks has signed a term sheet for a new funding round at a $188 billion valuation, led by existing backer Coatue Management. The company has not disclosed the size of the round, the full investor list or the per-share price, and the deal is expected to close later this summer.

The valuation is a sharp reset for a company that raised $7 billion at $134 billion in February 2026. If completed on the stated terms, the new round would put Databricks up 40% in five months and 88% in less than a year, despite the company remaining private.

What the capital is for

Databricks said the new money will support Unity AI Gateway, Genie and Lakebase, three products aimed at enterprises trying to control AI usage across internal data and multiple model providers. The pitch is that companies will pay for governance, routing and cost control around AI systems rather than relying only on the model providers themselves.

Unity AI Gateway manages model access and tracks spending. Genie is designed to let business users query governed enterprise data and generate answers or actions without needing a data engineer for every request. Lakebase is a serverless Postgres database built for AI agents and structured live data.

Chief executive Ali Ghodsi framed the strategy as giving customers a way to choose different models for different jobs based on cost and output. Databricks did not say how much of the new round will be allocated to each product, nor did it disclose updated revenue by product line.

Growth and ownership

Databricks was founded in 2013 by seven UC Berkeley AMPLab researchers: Ghodsi, Matei Zaharia, Ion Stoica, Patrick Wendell, Reynold Xin, Andy Konwinski and Arsalan Tavakoli-Shiraji. The company began by commercializing Apache Spark and has since built a broader data platform it calls a lakehouse.

The San Francisco company says more than 20,000 organizations use its platform, including adidas, AT&T and Mastercard, and that 70% of the Fortune 500 are customers. In February, Databricks reported a $5.4 billion annualized revenue run rate, up 65% year over year. It said AI products accounted for $1.4 billion of that run rate.

Databricks employs about 9,000 people globally. It has raised about $20.2 billion to date across its Series L and the new strategic round. Its cap table includes Andreessen Horowitz, Insight Partners, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Thrive Capital, Qatar Investment Authority and Blackstone.

Coatue has backed Databricks since its Series E in 2019. The New York crossover firm also holds positions in OpenAI, Anthropic, Snowflake and Instacart, and co-led Anthropic’s $65 billion Series H in May 2026.

The competitive read

Databricks is competing for the enterprise AI control layer against companies with deeper distribution. Snowflake, with a market capitalization of roughly $90 billion, is building Cortex AI into its data warehouse. Microsoft is bundling Copilot and Azure AI Foundry into enterprise contracts. Google Vertex AI and AWS SageMaker give cloud customers managed model infrastructure without requiring them to move platforms.

Databricks’ argument is independence: its tools are meant to work across models and clouds rather than steer customers toward one provider’s compute or software stack. That positioning is useful while enterprises are testing multiple AI providers, but hyperscalers can pressure the category by packaging similar controls inside existing cloud contracts.

Grand View Research valued the enterprise AI market at $30.2 billion in 2025 and projects it will reach $155.2 billion by 2030. Ghodsi has told investors Databricks is IPO-bound, potentially in 2027, while describing 2026 as a poor year to list because of crowded public-market activity. The $188 billion term sheet raises the bar for that eventual offering.

This story draws on original reporting from TechFundingNews.