Databricks Hits $188B Valuation in Coatue-Led Round
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- Databricks announced a new funding round valuing the company at $188 billion, led by Coatue, with the deal (reportedly ~$3 billion per other outlets) expected to close later this summer.
- The raise is the company's third mega-round since late 2024, following a $5 billion Series L at $134 billion in February, $1 billion at $100 billion in September 2025, and a then-record $10 billion at $62 billion in December 2024.
- Databricks pivoted from its cloud big-data roots (founded 2013) into an enterprise AI provider after ChatGPT's launch, rolling out products including the Lakebase database, Unity AI gateway, and Omnigent meta-harness.
- CEO Ali Ghodsi published internal benchmarks showing Z.ai's open-weight GLM 5.2 handled the hardest coding tasks at lower cost than proprietary models from Anthropic and OpenAI across 3,000 engineers.
- The same benchmark found that harness choice — the agentic coding tool wrapping the model — impacted costs as much as model selection, with open-source harness Pi cited as one of the lowest-cost, highest-quality options.
Why it matters: The $188 billion mark — roughly 3x the $62 billion valuation from just seven months ago — shows investor appetite for AI-adjacent enterprise infrastructure remains insatiable even as broader markets cool. Meanwhile, Databricks' public championing of cheap Chinese open-weight models like GLM 5.2 directly pressures Anthropic and OpenAI's pricing power in enterprise coding workloads, with Ghodsi's own benchmarking used as the evidence.
