Nvidia AI partner Databricks raises $500M to achieve $43B valuation

cointelegraph.com:

Cloud data company Databricks recently announced the completion of a Series I fundraising round where it raked in $500M from primary investor accounts led by T.Rowe and new investors Capital One Ventures, Ghisallo Capital Management, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan and Nvidia.

The latest investment round was achieved at a valuation of $43 billion dollars and a share price of $73.50, according to Databricks. Previously, the company raised $1.6 billion in series H funding at a valuation of $38 billion in 2021.

Databrick’s financial partnership with Nvidia indicates an increased synergy between the two artificial intelligence (AI) corporations with generative AI for enterprise data being the primary driver for the fundraise.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, per a Databricks press release, called enterprise data “a goldmine for generative AI,” adding “Databricks is doing incredible work with Nvidia technology to accelerate data processing and generative AI models.”

Databricks’ most prominent product is its “Lakehouse'' platform. Lakehouse essentially combines a data warehouse with a data lake for seamless developer workflow access.

Per the company’s press release:

Lakehouse empowers enterprise clients to build out their own generative AI models — sort of like a ChatGPT-style AI system that’s trained only on a client’s internal data. This architecture puts privacy controls in the purview of the business client and allows enterprises to fine-tune models in order to inhibit unwanted or erroneous outputs.

Related: AI startup Helsing raises $223 million in Series B funding for defense solutions

At a valuation of $43 billion, Databricks is one of the highest valued U.S. artificial intelligence companies in existence — trillion-dollar