How to Invest in Databricks in 2025

Databricks is a cloud-based platform that helps enterprise customers manage and analyze big data, conduct data science projects, and develop AI and machine learning tools.

With it, companies are able to make faster, more informed decisions, work more efficiently, and create better technologies.

To outsiders, this may seem rather run-of-the-mill, but Databricks' technology is in high demand. The company hit $3.7 billion in annualized revenue in July 2025, up 50% YoY.

Enterprise software is one of the most valuable spaces to be in, and investors have been pouring in.

In August 2025, Databricks announced it was closing its Series K at a $100 billion valuation*, up 61% from the $62 billion valuation it received in December 2024.

*This valuation makes it the 5th most valuable private company in the world.

Despite being an obvious public market candidate, this funding will more than likely delay Databricks' IPO for another year or two.

But that doesn't mean you have to wait to invest in it.

Here's how to buy Databricks before its IPO.

Can you buy Databricks stock?

Since Databricks is a private company, it doesn't have a stock symbol, and there's no way to buy it in your regular brokerage account.

Retail investors will have to wait for its IPO to buy shares of its stock (more on this below).

However, there is a way for accredited investors to buy its shares today, and there are several ways for retail investors to gain exposure through two different venture capital funds.

How to invest in Databricks

1. Accredited investors

Accredited investors can buy shares of Databricks stock from existing shareholders on Hiive, an investment platform for pre-IPO companies.

Are you an accredited investor?

You can qualify as an accredited investor if:

• You have an annual income of $200,000 individually or $300,000 jointly
• Your net worth exceeds $1,000,000, excluding your primary residence
• You are a qualifying financial professional

Hiive connects existing shareholders — who may be current or former employees, VC firms, or angel investors — with accredited investors who want to buy shares of private companies.

Unsurprisingly, Databricks is one of the most active securities on the platform:

On Hiive, sellers create listings by setting an asking price and quantity of shares available. Similar to a traditional stock exchange, buyers can accept a seller's asking price as listed or place bids.

Buyers can also add companies to their watchlist and get notified of any new listings or successful transactions.

Hit the button below to view current offerings for Databricks:

Register for Hiive

2. Retail investors

While SEC regulations prevent retail investors from directly buying private companies, there are other ways to gain exposure to Databricks.

a) Fundrise's Innovation Fund

Fundrise's Innovation Fund is a venture capital fund that is open to all investors. The fund targets private, high-growth technology companies for its portfolio.

It invested $25 million in Databricks in July 2023 and is one of the fund's largest holdings. The fund has also invested in Canva, Anduril Industries, Anthropic, and OpenAI.

The fund has a minimum investment of just $10 and an annual management fee of 1.85%.

You can read more about it in our Innovation Fund Review or on the Fundrise website.

b) ARK Venture Fund

The Innovation Fund isn't the only retail-friendly VC fund with exposure to Databricks. Cathie Wood's ARK Venture Fund also has a stake.

At the time of this writing, Databricks makes up 1.52% of the fund, the 21st largest position. Its largest positions are SpaceX (12.10%), xAI (7.10%), and Neuralink (6.05%). Lambda, OpenAI, Replit, and Anthropic are also in the top 10.

The fund invests in both public and private companies, so long as they meet the fund's theme of "disruptive innovation."

It charges an annual management fee of 2.90%. You can read more about it (and how to invest) on the ARK website.

c) Invest in Databricks' publicly traded investors

Including its most recent funding, Databricks has raised over $14 billion* from 92 investors over 14 rounds.

*This does not include its Series K in August 2025. The amount of capital raised has not been released.

While the vast majority of these investors are private equity firms and venture capitalists, there are a handful of publicly traded companies that own stakes in Databricks. 

Here's a quick breakdown:

• Microsoft (MSFT) participated in the Series E round in February 2019, which raised $250 million at a valuation of $2.8 billion.
• Microsoft and BlackRock (BLK) both invested in the Series F round in October 2019. The round raised $400 million at a $6.2 billion valuation.
• Amazon (AMZN), Salesforce (CRM), and Franklin Templeton (BEN) participated in the Series G round in February 2021, which raised $1 billion at a $27 billion valuation.
• Morgan Stanley (MS), BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, and T. Rowe Price (TROW) all invested in the Series H round in August 2021. $1.6 billion was raised at a $36.4 billion valuation.
• Nvidia (NVDA), Franklin Templeton, Capital One (COF), and T. Rowe Price all invested in the latest funding round in September 2023, which raised $685 million at a $43 billion valuation.

As you can see, there are plenty of companies with at least some exposure to Databricks. By investing in these companies' stocks, you will get indirect exposure to Databricks.

However, the problem with investing in any of these companies is that each of their stakes is likely very inconsequential in relation to the total size of their businesses.

d) Invest in Databrick's publicly traded competitors

If you're not happy with any of the above options, you may consider investing in Snowflake (SNOW), Databricks' primary competitor.

Snowflake's platform enables enterprise clients to consolidate data and uncover meaningful business insights. It generated $3.84 billion in revenue in the last 12 months and has a market capitalization of $64 billion.

If you're bullish on data analytics and database provider industries in general, Snowflake should be on your radar.

When will Databricks IPO?

Databricks was on track to IPO back in 2021 after raising $1.6 billion at a valuation of $36.4 billion, but decided to wait until a later date.

In late 2022, Databricks reportedly told its investors it was planning on an IPO by the summer of 2023. In June 2023, however, CEO Ali Ghodsi told Bloomberg those plans were postponed due to the weak market.

After announcing its Series K in August 2025, Ghodsi admitted Databricks hadn't planned to raise again so soon after its $10 billion Series J, but said investors had been reaching out almost daily to invest.

Investors may be more eager to buy into late-stage privately-held companies following Figma's (FIG) blockbuster IPO and Palantir's (PLTR) massive run-up.

Although this new round will almost certainly delay its IPO, Databricks looks destined for a public offering at some point.

When it does go public, you'll be able to look up its stock symbol and buy it in your brokerage account. If you're looking for a new broker, you may want to check out Public.

More about Databricks

How it's used

Databricks is a platform for building, sharing, and maintaining enterprise-level data, analytics, and AI solutions at scale.

It also deploys cloud infrastructure on behalf of its clients.

The Databricks workspace provides a unified workspace for a variety of data tasks, including:

• Data processing
• Generating dashboards and visualizations
• Managing security, governance, and disaster recovery
• Machine learning modeling, tracking, and generative AI solutions

These solutions save companies both time and money.

Products

Databricks offers a handful of products, which all integrate.

• Spark: The company's core offering, a web-based portal for data scientists to write queries in SQL, Python, and other languages for running data analysis.
• MosaicML: Acquired in June 2023 for $1.3 billion, MosaicML is used to train large language models (LLMs) and image generation models.
• MLFlow: Here, data scientists can build machine learning (ML) models, track their experiments, deploy them to production, and monitor their performance.
• Delta Lake: Delta Lake speeds up data queries and is the company's primary initiative to move into the data analytics category.
• Databricks SQL: This is a data warehouse that allows users to run SQL on top of Delta Lake, create visualizations, build and share dashboards, and use more tools for improving the usefulness of SQL.

Revenue

After revenue hit a $2.4 billion annualized run rate in the first half of 2024 — up 60% from the same period a year earlier — Databricks announced that number had jumped another 50% to $3.7 billion in July 2025.

Revenue growth is coming from two places. In addition to adding more clients, net revenue retention was higher than 140% in FY24, indicating significant revenue growth from existing customers.

Gross margins for FY24 were over 80%.

Profitability

While its revenue has grown substantially over the last few years, the company was not profitable at the time of its last fundraising round (in December 2024).

The company was expecting to achieve positive free cash flow in the quarter ending January 2025, but positive free cash flow is not the same thing as profitability.

For example, Snowflake (Databricks' main competitor) generated $3.6 billion in revenue last year and posted $900 million of positive cash flow, but still lost almost -$1.3 billion.*

*Among other things, stock-based compensation is not included in free cash flow calculations. In Snowflake's case, its free cash flow is positive while its net income is negative in large part due to stock-based compensation of nearly $1.5 billion.

While these figures do not guarantee Databricks is unprofitable, we can reasonably draw that conclusion, especially since most pre-IPO technology companies with outside funding operate at a short-term loss in order to maximize growth.

Who owns Databricks?

In addition to the public companies listed above, there are a number of private equity firms that have invested in Databricks.

Notable investors include Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Thrive Capital, Tiger Global Management, Founders Future, Green Bay Ventures, Alkeon Capital, Greenoaks Capital Partners, ClearBridge Investments, and more.

Co-founder and CEO Ali Ghodsi and other co-founders (Reynold Xin, Matei Zaharia, and Ion Stoica), as well as other executives and employees, all likely own portions of the company.

The exact ownership breakdown, however, is not publicly available.

Databricks valuation chart

As mentioned above, Databricks' most recent round was its Series K in August 2025, which valued the company at more than $100 billion.

This was up 61% from the $62 billion valuation it received in its Series J just 9 months earlier, in December 2024.

Here's a look at how Databricks' valuation has grown over time: