Databricks is apparently worth $100B. What do they even do?

It’s not like their website headline clears things up at all.

What is a data intelligence platform? Judging by the imagery, you’d be justified to believe Databricks somehow got a $100B valuation by selling these:

The magic eight ball says: don’t count on it.

I first wrote about this frankly very odd company back in 2020, when they were only worth a paltry $6B. Here’s the TL;DR that I put atop the post:

Databricks sells a data science and analytics platform – i.e. a place to query and share data – built on top of an open source package called Apache Spark.

- Apache Spark is an open source engine for running analytics and machine learning across distributed, giant datasets

- Spark is notoriously hard to run on your own infrastructure and companies often don’t have the expertise to do that

- Databricks provides a managed service for running Spark clusters, as well as notebooks for visualization and exploration, plus the ability to schedule pipelines

- More recently, Databricks has been expanding the product portfolio to include ML and data warehousing

This is a pretty big company, all things considered - $6.2B was their most recent valuation, and they’re planning on going public in 2021.

A lot has changed since then (except the fact that Databricks is still private. Planning on going public in 2021. We all fell for that one). The world is awash in Generative AI. The entire corporate universe is uprooting their playbooks and shifting towards AI, OpenAI and Anthropic are worth hundreds of billions of dollars[1] By this all I mean is that someone was willing to buy their shares at this price. They are not “worth” hundreds of billions in the sense that a Rolex, or say a bar of gold, is “worth” their respective prices., and NVIDIA is selling GPUs faster than they can make them.