Databricks raises new round at $188B valuation amid AI transition

Databricks announced a new funding round valuing the company at $188 billion, led by Coatue, with the round expected to close later in 2026. The company did not disclose the exact amount raised.

This marks the latest in a year-and-a-half fundraising surge: in December 2024, Databricks raised $10 billion at a $62 billion valuation; in September 2025, it raised $1 billion at a $100 billion valuation; and in February 2026, it closed a $5 billion Series L at a $134 billion valuation.

The company has repositioned itself from a big-data analytics provider into an AI infrastructure company, launching products such as Lakebase (a database built for AI agents), Unity (an AI gateway), and Omnigent (a meta-harness for managing multiple agents).

Databricks has also emphasized the use of open-weight models, particularly Z.ai’s GLM 5.2, for coding tasks, citing internal benchmarking that found open models could handle high-difficulty coding tasks at lower cost than proprietary alternatives from Anthropic and OpenAI.

The company’s internal benchmarking, shared by CEO Ali Ghodsi, compared models on tasks performed by 3,000 software engineers and found that both model choice and the choice of agentic coding harness (e.g., open-source Pi) significantly impacted costs without sacrificing quality.

Analysts note that Databricks’ AI repositioning has contributed to its ability to raise capital at escalating valuations, reflecting broader market interest in AI infrastructure and agentic tooling.