In an announcement that could be said to confer upon the analytics company the title of “super unicorn,” Databricks Inc. today announced a $1.6 billion late-stage funding round that pegs its valuation at $38 billion.

The Series H round, which was expected, comes just seven months after the company shook up the market for analytics startups with a $1 billion Series G round that valued it at $28 billion. The funding was led by Morgan Stanley & Co LLC’s Counterpoint Global Fund and at least 14 new and existing investors.

Databricks has been the poster child of a frenzy of venture capital investments in analytics and data management startups that have totaled nearly $17 billion since Snowflake Inc.’s successful initial public offering nearly a year ago, with more than $15 billion of that raised in the past eight months, according to Crunchbase.

The new round brings Databricks’ total funding to almost $3.6 billion, a cash hoard it will use “to accelerate the company’s lead in the massive and rapidly growing data lakehouse market,” it said in a statement. “Lakehouse” is a term Databricks coined to describe an analytical data store that incorporates elements of both a structured data warehouse and a semi-structured data lake. It’s considered a leader in bringing structured elements to data lakes while incorporating open standards and support for the SQL query language.

The company is betting that the information technology world will go multicloud and that the centralized data warehouse metaphor is shattering. “This lakehouse paradigm is a cloud native way of organizing your data that’s different from how you would do things on-premises,” Chief Executive Ali Ghodsi (pictured) told John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, in an interview last June. “Think through what’s the right way of doing it in the cloud. Don’t just try to copy and paste what you had on-premises.”

Dynamic duo

Databricks and Snowflake have led the charge toward a new model of cloud-native models for analytics and business intelligence. They come at the problem from fundamentally different perspectives, with Snowflake epitomizing and centralized but shared model while Databricks emphasizes a distributed architecture. However, many analysts expect them to meet in the middle, as exemplified by Snowflake’s recent jettisoning of the term “warehouse” for the more amorphous “data cloud.”

Databricks has also been a leading advocate of a popular emerging architecture called a “data mesh,” which is an alternative approach to data analysis that invests ownership of data assets in the business units that create it rather than a central repository. Although no company has put together an end-to-end mesh solution, “We are productizing it,” Ghodsi said in a recent interview with SiliconANGLE. “We’re going to announce many more capabilities in a unified end-to-end stack.”

Snowflake and Databricks “have been the ones to watch since the middle of the last decade with a strong market fit, amazing growth, capable managements strong technology and enormous markets,” said David Vellante, chief analyst at Wikibon, SiliconANGLE’s research affiliate. “I don’t expect there will be more than a handful of these super-unicorns in this space.”

Late-stage booster

With so much cash in the bank already, it’s clear that Databricks didn’t need the money but “it’s not uncommon for a hot company headed for IPO to let very late-stage investors in at a discount to the IPO price,” Vellante said. “It guarantees another large cash infusion for the company and gives late-stage investors a relatively low-risk entry into the stock.”

The round is notable both for the number of investors involved and the presence of at least five financial institutions on the list: The Bank of New York Mellon Corp., BlackRock Inc., Fidelity Management & Research Co., Franklin Templeton Financial Services Corp. and T. Rowe Price Group Inc.

The draw for those conservative firms is “lots of liquidity, lots of ‘follow the leader’ money,” Vellante said. The size of the tranche recognizes that “the digital economy is, at the core, about data,” he said. “The ability to not only do analytics but actually begin monetizing data directly with data products is something that is real and super-valuable.”

In conjunction with the funding announcement, Databricks also said it has hired former Salesforce.com Chief Operating Officer Andy Kofoid as president of global field operations. Kofoid has led sales operations for more than 25 years at companies that include Dassault Systemes Americas Corp. and MatrixOne Inc. and served in sales and sales management positions at Oracle Corp. and IBM Corp.

Photo: SiliconANGLE