Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and CEO of Databricks, said:
data brick
Data analytics software startup Databricks announced Wednesday. Meta has signed on as an investor.
Meta plays an important role in artificial intelligence as the company that trains the popular Llama open source large-scale language model (LLM) built by Databricks. Databricks is working closely with Meta’s Llama team, the startup’s co-founder and CEO Ali Ghodsi said in an interview this week.
That relationship extends to Meta co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
“We have talked about open source software in the past and he is very interested in the open source model and Llama,” Ghodsi said.
Meta doesn’t invest in as many startups as its technology peers alphabet And Microsoft. But Databricks is a rapidly growing company headed for a major initial public offering. Meta invested in Databricks’ $10 billion round, one of the largest investments in venture capital history. Databricks currently has raised $14 billion in venture funding.
The new funds will be used to expand globally and provide liquidity for current and former employees.
Databricks also announced Wednesday a $5.25 billion credit facility led by JPMorgan Chase. Godi said that even with high interest rates, credit can be a much better option than spending on equity or diluting existing shareholders.
Last year, Databricks was able to use banked funds to train its own open source LLM, called DBRX, at a cost of approximately $10 million. In some tests at the time, DBRX performed better than Meta’s Llama and other alternatives, but other models quickly surpassed it.
This is one of the reasons why it made sense for Databricks to partner with the most prominent open model builder. Meta has plenty of capital available for capital expenditures to train its models, and Databricks could use that money in other ways, Godoshi said.
He declined to say whether Mehta was a customer.
Based in San Francisco, Databricks currently has 8,000 employees. “It wouldn’t be a big surprise to me if we went public” a year from now, Gozi said.
Qatar Investment Authority, Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund, participated in the $10 billion round along with Meta. Godoshi said Databricks is open to running its software on the data centers of major carriers in the Middle East. Currently, it is only available in the following ways: Amazon,Google, microsoft cloud.
