Comment by ed_elliott_asc 4 days ago
I can’t help feeling it is the first major misstep from databricks , they are raising the money for their hosted Postgres and ai platform.
Ai is not far away from dropping to the “trough of disillusionment” and I can’t see why databricks even needs Postgres.
Hopefully I’m wrong as I’m a big fan of databricks.
The first major misstep? Brother they already raised A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H and I. At what point do you end the suffering?
They are not raising $100B, they are raising money at a valuation of $100B.
what is the investor thesis for coming in with such a multiple? You know they will have to find a a greater fool, possibly the public to buy at an even higher ratio to break any profit on that....
This isn't really venture investing at this point. The valuation risk calculation is very different for preferred shares than common stock, and with a healthy ARR they have very little risk (maybe not much profit, but it's not that different than a bond on some level...).
Definitely seem like bad investments from my perspective on databricks.
Databricks is great at offering a "distributed spark/kubernetes in a box" platform. But its AI integration is one of the least helpful I've experienced. It's very interuptive to a workflow, and very rarely offers genuinely useful help. Most users I've seen turn it off, something databricks must be aware of because they require admins permission for users to opt out of AI.
I don't mean to rant, there's lots that is useful in databricks, but it doesn't seem like this funding round is targeting any of that.