Databricks hits 188 billion dollar valuation, extending its run as AI's favorite second act

3:12 PM · July 18, 2026

Databricks is raising a new strategic round of funding, roughly 3 billion dollars led by Coatue, that values the company at 188 billion dollars, according to TechCrunch and the company's own newsroom, up sharply from the 134 billion dollar valuation it set in a 5 billion dollar Series L round just five months ago in February. The company has spent the past year and a half remaking its image from a data warehousing and analytics company into an AI platform, and has become one of the clearest examples of an established enterprise software company successfully repositioning itself for the AI era rather than being disrupted by it. Databricks chief executive Ali Ghodsi has also published internal benchmarking research comparing AI coding models across the actual tasks used by the company's roughly 3,000 software engineers, finding that open weight models, and Z.ai's GLM 5.2 in particular, can now handle even the highest difficulty coding tasks at a lower total cost than proprietary models from Anthropic and OpenAI. That research has made Databricks something of a public champion for enterprises adopting cheaper, Chinese developed open weight models for cost control rather than defaulting to closed frontier labs. The new round has not yet closed and is expected to finalize later this summer.