Databrinks Inc. is reportedly raising at least $1.5 billion in new funding on a valuation of $38 billion despite previous reports that it was planning on going public this year.

Bloomberg, citing three people familiar with the terms, said Morgan Stanley will lead the round. The report added that the round could grow even larger and is a sign of investor enthusiasm for services that help businesses move their data to the cloud.

Founded in 2013, Databricks is best known for its Unified Data Analytics Platform based on the open-source Apache Spark big-data framework. The company’s software platform helps customers unify their analytics across business, data science and data engineering.

Companies use Databricks’ software to build information pipelines across siloed storage systems, analyze that data and then prepare labeled data sets that can be used to train artificial intelligence and machine learning models. The software also offers collaborative features to improve communications between data scientists and engineers to build more useful AI models.

The Databricks platform works with leading cloud service providers, including Google LLC’s Cloud, Microsoft Corp.’s Azure and Amazon Web Services Inc.

The new funding comes on top of $1 billion raised by Databricks in February on a $28 billion valuation. It was noted at the time as being comparable to Snowflake Inc., which also raised a large amount of money before going public in September.

Snowflake and Databricks work in similar areas and are direct competitors in cloud data warehousing but are tackling two different problems.

Carl Olofson, research vice president for data management software at International Data Corp., previously told SiliconANGLE that “Snowflake is more of a persistent data platform that also does some data sharing and transformation.”

“I see Databricks as more of an analytical workbench,” Olofson explained. “Whereas Snowflake uses a schema, which is an organizational blueprint for a database management system, and supports queries in SQL, Databricks uses Spark to run analytics queries against semi-structured, schemaless data.”

Dave Vellante, chief analyst at SiliconANGLE Media sister research firm Wikibon, put it more simply, saying that “Snowflake is disrupting data lakes. Databricks is making them better.”

Databricks had previously raised $1.9 billion, according to Crunchbase. Investors include Microsoft, AWS, Andreessen Horowitz, Salesforce Ventures, T. Rowe Price, Discovery Capital, Tiger Global, New Enterprise Association, Alkeon Capital, Green Bay Ventures and Octahedron Capital.

Image: Databricks