The Series C funding round comes as Databricks deepens its commitment to open source Apache Spark and accelerates investment in its commercial product, the Databricks just-in-time data platform. Contributions from Databricks helped to propel the Spark engine to set world records this year, including the CloudSort benchmark , while Spark meetup members worldwide more than quadrupled in size from 66,000 in 2015 to more than 288,000 in 2016. Spark is the de facto technology for big data analytics and processing today, being the most active open-source project in the big data space with over 1,000 contributors from more than 250 organisations.
Databricks delivers a just-in-time data platform in the cloud powered by Apache Spark to simplify data integration, real-time exploration, and robust deployment of production applications. The current round of financing validates Databricks’ leadership as the first and only fully managed Spark platform in the cloud that instantly delivers a rich suite of reliability, usability, security, and compliance functionalities for data science, engineering, and IT teams. The company will continue to expand its data platform to make data science and engineering at scale with Spark even easier and faster, and to integrate with other cloud providers to provide more flexibility for its fast-growing global customer base.
“In 2016, we witnessed an acceleration in data processing workloads moving to the cloud,” said Pete Sonsini, General Partner at NEA. “With its product vision and deep Spark expertise, Databricks is well-positioned to further drive this revolution. We are excited to partner with the team as they take their next generation cloud data platform to broader markets.”
As Spark's adoption moves into mainstream in large data-driven enterprises in all industries, Databricks has seen an explosive uptick in customer demand and adoption, serving more than 400 customers today. This additional investment will enable the company to continue to expand key areas including product development, customer success, sales and marketing.
“Apache Spark has enabled countless enterprises and cutting-edge early adopters to createbusiness value through advanced analytics solutions,” said Ali Ghodsi, CEO and Co-Founder at Databricks. “As Spark’s adoption and the demand for our managed Spark platform continues to rise, this funding will advance our engineering and go-to-market strategies to address all of our
customer’s pain points as we continue to grow the Spark community.”
