Databricks has signed a term sheet for a new strategic round at a $188 billion valuation, led by Coatue Management, with the deal expected to close later this summer.
The valuation marks a 40% jump in five months, from $134 billion in February, and an 88% rise in under a year, as investors price the enterprise AI governance layer at a premium over the model builders beneath it.
New capital will go into Unity AI Gateway, Genie, and Lakebase: three products built on the premise that controlling AI costs and access is worth more in the long term than building AI itself.
Seven academics from UC Berkeley founded Databricks in 2013 to commercialise Apache Spark, a data processing engine they had built in a university lab. Twelve years later, their company is signing term sheets at a $188 billion valuation — higher than Goldman Sachs, higher than IBM, and closing in on Salesforce — without ever having gone public.
Databricks has signed a term sheet for a new strategic funding round at a $188 billion valuation, led by existing investor Coatue Management, with participation from new and returning investors. The round is expected to close later this summer and is the company’s second major financing event of the year, arriving five months after a $7 billion raise at $134 billion in February 2026.
