3. Databricks

Founders: Ali Ghodsi (CEO), Matei Zaharia, Reynold Xin, Ion Stoica, Patrick Wendell, Andy Konwinski, Arsalan Tavakoli-Shiraji
Launched: 2013
Headquarters: San Francisco
Funding: $19 billion
Valuation: $62 billion
Key Technologies: Artificial intelligence, cloud computing, explainable AI, generative AI, machine learning, digital twins, low code/no code software
Industry: Enterprise technology
Previous appearances on Disruptor 50 list: 5 (No. 5 in 2024)

If data is the new oil, as it is often posited, Databricks is a source that companies are increasingly tapping into to make sense of the potential riches. There are software companies that are bigger, but few if any are growing as fast.

Over 12,000 organizations around the world, from Fortune 500 companies to government agencies and sports teams, rely on Databricks to help them funnel their data into evolving analytics, machine learning, and AI applications. Its software organizes and analyzes data in the cloud, revolutionizing an industry once dominated by siloed data and on-premises software firms like Oracle.

The cloud boom has led to impressive growth for the company, with over 500 customers working with Databricks at an annual revenue rate of over $1 million, as of last year, and $600 million in annual recurring revenue for its core SQL product in the year ended Oct. 31, 2024, representing a 150% year-over-year increase. Overall, the company had a $3 billion revenue run rate in the quarter that ended on Jan. 31, and was on pace to generate positive free cash flow for the first time.

Investors, including the recent addition of Meta, have continued to bid up shares of the privately held company, with a fundraising round in January of $10 billion, one of the biggest rounds in venture capital history that valued the company at $62 billion – in addition to a $5.25 billion debt financing led by JPMorgan Chase. That valuation was up from $43 billion two years earlier at a time when many companies are still attempting to get back to pre-2022 to 2023 tech startup crash valuations.

The $15 billion in financing has contributed to an acquisition spree for the company, including $1 billion deals for cloud-based data companies Tabular and most recently, Neon. 

It is also getting more closely interwoven in the AWS ecosystem, with a deal announced last October to buy AWS Trainium chips as the preferred AI chip to power its Mosaic AI model training — MosaicML was a key Databricks gen AI acquisition in 2023. The use of AWS chips will allow Databricks and Amazon to offer more competitive pricing for clients that are training LLMs on their proprietary data. 

Databricks' AWS business alone had surpassed a $1 billion run rate at the time of the chip deal, and according to the company, has doubled annually over the past few years. 

It also partnered with major software vendor SAP in February to combine its data analysis tools with SAP's human resources, finance and logistics software.

"The way I think about it, the most important enterprise data on the planet today is actually SAP data, and now you are marrying it with the best data platform," Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi said in an interview with CNBC. 

The company, which now employs over 8,000 people, is one of the most closely watched in the tech sector IPO market. Ghodsi has been coy about specific plans across multiple interviews, but told CNBC in January that it would not be "a huge surprise to me if we were public" a year from now.

Though he also noted at the time of the $10 billion fundraise in December that within the private markets, the biggest investors have reason to keep pouring money into startups that once would have gone public much sooner. "There's nowhere to put it, really, except maybe Databricks, Stripe or, you know, maybe OpenAI," Ghodsi told CNBC.