Big data analytics platform Databricks raises $140M Series D led by Andreessen Horowitz
Databricks, a big data analytics platform built by a team that grew out of the Apache Spark project, today announced that it has raised a $140 million Series D round led by Andreessen Horowitz …
Context & Ripple Effects
Databricks is on a fast fundraising cadence: just eight months after its $60M Series C led by NEA, in which Andreessen Horowitz already participated, the Spark team is back with a larger round now led by that same investor. The company is monetizing an open-source project it created rather than building proprietary tech first.
The bet pays off quickly in the related coverage — by early 2019 Databricks closes a $250M Series E at a $2.75B valuation, again with Andreessen Horowitz leading, confirming the Series D as the midpoint of a sustained capital ramp.
First-order effects
- Andreessen Horowitz moves from participant to lead investor, deepening its position in the commercialization of Apache Spark, while Databricks gains the capital to scale its analytics platform beyond the founding engineering team.
Second-order effects
- Cloud and big-data rivals face a competitor whose distribution advantage is the open-source community itself — every Spark adoption is potential pipeline for Databricks' paid platform.
Third-order effects
- The trajectory holds across the corpus: the same company later raises a $500M+ Series I at a $43B valuation with more than 10K clients, suggesting open-source-project spinouts can compound into infrastructure-scale businesses if they own both the upstream project and the commercial layer.
The trend: Open-source infrastructure projects are increasingly monetized through venture-backed platforms whose valuations escalate round over round as the underlying technology becomes industry standard.