Big data specialist Databricks Inc. has just landed a massive late-stage funding round of $140 million to fund its expansion into artificial intelligence.

The company, which was founded by the creators of the Apache Spark big data engine, said today that the Series D round brings its total capital raised to $247 million. The latest round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from New Enterprise Associates and Battery Ventures. It comes only nine months since a $60 million Series C round last December.

Ali Ghodsi (pictured), chief executive officer of Databricks, said the new funds would be primarily used to accelerate the company’s investment in AI. He said the aim is to make the technology more accessible to organizations via its Unified Analytics Platform, which is built atop Spark and serves to unify data science with data engineering and business.

Ghodsi explained that Databricks is trying to fix what he calls the “1 percent problem” in AI, wherein a handful of companies such as Amazon Web Services Inc., Google Inc., Facebook Inc. and Microsoft Corp. basically hold a monopoly on the majority of the talent and innovation going on in the space. “Less than 10 companies in the world are achieving the full potential of AI and the rest are really struggling,” Ghodsi said in the announcement.

As a result, he reckons that although many organizations are exploring how to use AI to gain a competitive advantage, very few can actually do so as they lack the necessary talent and expertise. “Databricks’ mission is to simplify AI and bring it to the other 99 percent of enterprise organizations,” he said.

Besides beefing up its AI capabilities, Databricks will also use the new money to boost its investment into its Unified Data Analytics platform, accelerate its growth strategy, and create new “industry-specific” solutions for the healthcare and life sciences, financial services, government and other segments.

“If you want to build competitive advantage using Artificial Intelligence and you are not Google or Facebook, Databricks is essential,” Ben Horowitz, co-founder and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, said in the announcement. “We’ve looked at every solution on the market and nothing else comes close.”

Ghodsi spoke to SiliconANGLE Media’s video unit theCUBE at the Spark Summit conference in June:

(Disclosure: Databricks Inc. sponsored this Spark Summit 2017 segment on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither Databricks nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE