Amid an unprecedented flood of private money flowing into startups from electric trucks to rockets, one of the hottest is a relatively little-known cloud-software vendor, Databricks Inc., which illustrates how modern computing is changing.
Databricks last week raised $1.6 billion in funding, boosting its valuation by 35% within about six months to $38 billion and making it the fourth-largest privately held, venture-backed U.S. company, according to research firm PitchBook Data Inc. The three biggest American cloud-computing vendors and fierce competitors— Amazon . com Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Google parent Alphabet Inc. —all boosted their investments in the startup, Databricks Chief Executive Ali Ghodsi said in an interview.
