Databricks Is now an AI-native company

The AI-agenda for Databricks primes it for an upcoming IPO 🗝️

Hey Everyone,

As some of you know, I’m a huge fan of talking about Databricks and Snowflake. Among the initial public offering (IPO) market, post-pandemic, it’s only in 2025 that we see a proper recovery to back to normal, and the IPO I’m most excited about then is certainly Databricks.

Databricks is doing its best to position itself as an AI-native company. In a nutshell, Databricks provides tools that help you connect your sources of data to one platform to process, store, share, analyze, model, and monetize datasets with solutions from BI to generative AI.

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Databricks has a rich history of acquiring AI startups and some of them of considerable talent. This was the case in July, 2023 when they acquired MosaicML. Databricks and MosaicML had shared a vision of making generative AI accessible for all organizations, enabling them to build, own and secure generative AI models, including LLMs with their proprietary data.

Databrick is often compared to Snowflake, that is already a public company. In terms of revenue growth for the year ending January 31, 2024, Databricks pulled in $1.6 billion, a number that represented growth of more than 50% over the prior year. That’s relatively rare when we are talking about a company of a market cap over $40 Billion. I have a lot of faith in this executive team as well, while Snowflake itself has a market cap of over $50 Billion.

It’s not clear which company will be dominant in their space. Databricks is pursuing the standard cloud data warehouse agenda with customers more and more, but they come from the data science engineering heritage. Snowflake, conversely, is optimized for storing and analyzing structured data, with a strong focus on ease of use and scalability in data warehousing. The one that wins might be the one seen as more AI-native and Generative AI sophisticated.

Full disclosure I’m partial to startups that come out of UC Berkeley, like Databricks, Anyscale and other robotics startups I’ve covered recently. But there is another reason to like what Databrick is doing, and that is open-source Generative LLMs.

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