FILE PHOTO: Databricks logo is seen in this illustration taken December 17, 2024. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
(Reuters) - Databricks said on Wednesday Meta Platforms had joined as an investor in a $10 billion funding round intended to fuel the data analytics startup's expansion plans and new product development.
The Series J funding round closed on Wednesday and valued Databricks at $62 billion.
The company also secured a $5.25 billion credit facility led by JPMorgan Chase alongside Barclays, Citi, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley.
Founded in 2013, San Francisco-based Databricks offers a platform designed to help users ingest, analyze and build artificial intelligence applications using complex data from a variety of sources.
Investors are racing to pour money into AI-related startups after the meteoric success of OpenAI's ChatGPT triggered a surge in corporate adoption of the technology.
Sam Altman-led OpenAI raised $6.6 billion from investors in 2024.
Companies, including Meta, have been investing heavily to build and train large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, which are advanced AI systems designed to understand and generate human-like text.
Databricks works closely with Meta's Llama team. Llama is a family of open-source LLMs developed by the Facebook parent.
"Thousands of customers are using Llama on Databricks and we have been working closely with Meta on how to best serve those enterprise customers with Llama," Databricks co-founder and CEO Ali Ghodsi said.
"It naturally made sense for both parties to deepen that partnership through this investment."
More than 10,000 organizations, including Comcast, Block, Rivian and Shell, rely on the company's Databricks Data Intelligence Platform to manage and analyze data for AI applications, according to its website.
(Reporting by Jaspreet Singh in Bengaluru and Krystal Hu in Davos; Editing by Devika Syamnath)
