Databricks Hits $188B Valuation in Coatue-Led Round — SkimNews
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- Databricks announced a new funding round led by Coatue that values the company at $188 billion, with the deal expected to close later this summer though the money isn't yet in hand
- The round totals roughly $3 billion per other outlets, with a VC telling TechCrunch demand was so intense Databricks had no reason to keep the valuation quiet
- Databricks has stacked four massive raises in 19 months: $62 billion (Dec 2024), $100 billion (Sept 2025), $134 billion (Feb 2026), and now $188 billion — so many rounds that fans memed about running out of alphabet letters
- Founded in 2013 as a big-data analytics platform, Databricks rebuilt itself as an AI provider, rolling out Lakebase (database for AI agents), Unity (AI gateway), and Omnigent (a meta-harness managing multiple agents)
- Databricks has become a leading example of enterprises adopting cheaper Chinese open-weight models to control AI spend, championing Z.ai's GLM 5.2 specifically for coding tasks
- CEO Ali Ghodsi's internal benchmark across 3,000 engineers found harness choice — the agentic coding tool wrapping a model — mattered as much as model selection, with open-source Pi rated among the best for managing context and cutting costs versus Anthropic and OpenAI models
Why it matters: Databricks priced at 3x its December 2024 valuation in under two years, with so much investor demand it announced before the money landed — a rare move that reveals AI infrastructure FOMO. Its public championing of Z.ai's GLM 5.2 over proprietary alternatives puts direct pricing pressure on OpenAI and Anthropic for enterprise AI budgets, since Databricks is telling 3,000 engineers the Chinese model beats pricier options.
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