Databricks’ revenue growth exceeds 80% to $6.9 billion annually

Databricks plays a unique role in the AI ​​boom. Revenue continues to soar as businesses flock to the company’s data analytics tools. But as clients rely more on AI agents to clean and interrogate their data, Databricks has endured rising costs, leading to lower profit margins.

“This is a consumption-based business model, and this is where agent AI comes in,” Databricks CEO Ali Godoshi told CNBC in an interview Tuesday at the company’s Data and AI Summit in San Francisco. “Agents are generating more and more queries. We have all these agents, and the agents and the agent platform are also generating revenue, so it’s just going to increase the consumption of everything.”

Databricks told analysts at a conference that annual revenue has surged more than 80% year-over-year and now stands at $6.9 billion, up from $5.4 billion in the fourth quarter of its fiscal year.

Databricks has a private market valuation of $134 billion, making it more valuable than its competitors. snowflakewent public in 2020 and currently has a market capitalization of approximately $83 billion. Based on its latest quarterly results released last month, Snowflake has annual sales of about $5.6 billion.

Databricks remains on the sidelines of the public markets even as its highly valued peers line up for IPOs. space x It made its biggest debut in history last week, surpassing $2 trillion in market capitalization on its first day of trading on Friday. And AI model developers OpenAI and Anthropic have applied for confidential access.

Although Databricks is often classified as an AI modeling company, it plays a completely different role in the market. Databricks’ Genie can answer questions from business users about enterprise data, and its Agent Bricks allows developers to build custom AI apps. As these products grow in popularity, Databricks has to spend more money on the underlying models.

Godi declined to reveal Databrix’s current gross profit margins, but said he expects them to decline further. His company now has $1.7 billion in annual revenue from AI products, up from $1.4 billion in February.

One of the big trends in AI today is that companies are cracking down on runaway spending through the use of tokens. Databricks’ Unity AI Gateway can notify people when their AI budget is about to run out.

Companies have moved away from token maximization, or encouraging employees to use as many tokens as possible, and are now doing “value maximization” to optimize efficiency while leveraging the power of AI, Godi said.

Large companies “want to make sure they have the cutting-edge, smartest models available,” he said, highlighting Anthropic’s Mythos. “They’re interested in it, but not for everything, right? And for everyday tasks, they want to keep costs down and use a simple open source model.”

Ghodsi said the Chinese model is very popular among Databricks customers.

“Customers really want choice,” he says.

Databricks aims to grow by selling sophisticated tools for specific industries. The company announced its entry into the cybersecurity market in March with the introduction of Lakewatch software. Databricks on Tuesday announced it will acquire security startup Panther valued at $1.4 billion in 2021 and unveiled CustomerLake software for managing marketing data.

clock: Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi: AI doesn’t have an intelligence problem. problem with context