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Tag: Databricks

  • These 5 AI Startups Raised the Most Money in 2025

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    Thinking of launching a startup and want to top the funding charts? Your best bet these days is in the artificial intelligence space. That probably doesn’t come as a big surprise, given how prevalent news has been this year about mega-funding rounds for AI startups. But as fears of an AI bubble grow on Wall Street and real world adoption and use is still tentative, venture capitalists are flinging money at the companies building and supporting the technology at a staggering pace.

    In the first half of 2025, funding to AI startups totaled $116 billion, which was greater than the total investor spend in 2024, according to CB Insights. That number increased by another $45 billion in the third quarter.

    Some AI companies have done better than others in raising funding, though. Here’s a look at the biggest funding deals in the space this year.

    OpenAI

    It should come as no surprise that OpenAI, co-founded and run by Sam Altman, holds the title for the biggest single round raise of 2025. Its $40 billion round in March was the largest ever by a private tech company. It spiked the company’s valuation up to $300 billion, putting it just below SpaceX’s $350 billion figure and on par with TikTok parent company ByteDance. (That second-place ranking didn’t last long. A secondary sale last month valued the company at $500 billion. And there’s now talk of an IPO, which could be the biggest of all time.) Japan’s SoftBank was the largest contributor, kicking in $30 billion. Other backers included Microsoft, Coatue, Altimeter and Thrive. OpenAI, at the time, said it would use the money to “push the frontiers of AI research even further” and further scale its compute infrastructure.

    xAI

    Elon Musk’s AI startup doesn’t make formal announcements about funding, but Bloomberg, in October, reported the company had increased an ongoing funding round to $20 billion. Nvidia was reportedly one of the contributors, but has not confirmed that. The $20 billion figure leaked a month after reports that xAI was only planning to raise $10 billion in debt and equity. Musk has denied the reports on social media.

    Scale AI

    Scale AI was the beneficiary of Mark Zuckerberg’s 2025 spending spree, which was designed to beef up Meta’s AI workforce. Meta invested $14.3 billion in the company, taking a 49 percent ownership stake, but one that gives it no voting power and no access to Scale AI’s business information or data. As part of that deal, founder Alexandr Wang joined Meta, saying “opportunities of this magnitude often come at a cost.” A small number of Scale AI employees joined him in the move.

    Anthropic

    Anthropic introduced its AI assistant Claude in March of 2023 and has been on a steady climb ever since. In September, the company, founded by Daniela Amodei and Dario Amodei, closed its biggest round yet, raising $13 billion, which brought its valuation to $183 billion. That’s nearly three times what the company was valued at in March of this year, when it closed a $3.5 billion round at a $61.5 valuation. The September round was led by Iconiq, Fidelity Management & Research Co. and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

    Databricks

    While it’s not an AI company itself, the Databricks platform is used by large language models at AI firms to combine and standardize data, helping them learn. In early January, the company, which was founded by Ali Ghodsi, Ion Stoica, Matei Zaharia, Patrick Wendell, Reynold Xin, Andy Konwinski, and Arsalan Tavakoli-Shiraji, closed a Series J funding round for $10 billion, which it said it would use for expansion plans and product development. Backers included Meta, Thrive Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, DST Global, GIC, and Iconiq Growth. It raised the company’s valuation from $43 billion to $62 billion. 

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    Chris Morris

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  • Exclusive: Naveen Rao’s new AI hardware startup targets $5B valuation with backing from a16z, sources say

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    Naveen Rao, who was formerly the head of artificial intelligence at Databricks, is in talks to raise $1 billion at a $5 billion valuation for a new startup called Unconventional, Inc., that’s building a new type of computer, according to four people familiar with discussions. 

    Andreessen Horowitz has agreed to lead the investment, and Lightspeed and Lux Capital are also participating in the deal, two of the sources said, although none of those VC firms responded to our request for comment. Databricks is also said to be investing in Rao’s new company, Bloomberg reported last month. 

    Rao has already raised hundreds of millions and plans to begin building the startup without waiting for the full $1 billion round to close, our sources said. He plans to raise the rest of the capital in installments, a funding approach commonly referred to as a “tranched” round. 

    Rao declined to comment, although he did publicly acknowledge the new startup on X last week, confirming its name and describing its hoped-for product as “rethinking the foundations of a computer to build a new substrate for intelligence that is as efficient as biology. Brain Scale Efficiency without the biological baggage!”

    Databricks acquired Rao’s previous startup, MosaicML in 2023, for $1.3 billion. Founded by Rao in 2020 with a focus on training and deploying large AI models, MosaicML raised $33.7 million from investors, including Lux Capital, DCVC, Playground Global, and Samsung Next, according to PitchBook. Prior to MosaicML, Rao co-founded the machine learning platform Nervana Systems, which Intel Corp. acquired in 2016 for reportedly more than $400 million. 

    Rao, who spent over two years as VP of AI at Databricks (now valued at $100 billion and generating $4 billion in ARR), left the company last month to focus on his new startup, according to his LinkedIn profile and earlier reporting by Bloomberg.

    Our sources say Rao’s vision will essentially compete with Nvidia by designing a novel AI machine that includes both custom silicon chips and server infrastructure. 

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    Marina Temkin

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  • Sam Altman’s OpenAI Is Officially the World’s Most Valuable Startup at $500B

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    A secondary share sale propelled OpenAI’s valuation, setting a new record for private companies. The Washington Post via Getty Images

    OpenAI has reached a new milestone: a $500 billion valuation that makes it the world’s most valuable private company, surpassing Elon Musk’s SpaceX and widening the gap with other major private companies like its direct competitor, Anthropic, and TikTok parent ByteDance.

    The staggering valuation follows a secondary shares sale, first reported by Bloomberg, that allowed current and former employees to sell stock to investors, including Thrive Capital, SoftBank, Dragoneer Investment Group, MGX and T. Rowe Price, The sale didn’t bring new funding to the company but boosted its valuation from $300 billion in March, when it raised $40 billion in a round led by SoftBank.

    OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit dedicated to advancing A.I. for humanity’s benefit, but later adopted a capped-profit structure. The company currently has about 700 million weekly users and $12 billion in annualized revenue. It has signed some of the largest cloud deals, including a $300 billion partnership with Oracle for computing power over the next five years.

     

    The company is also in the midst of a long-anticipated transition to a for-profit structure. Last month, it signed a non-binding deal with Microsoft, its largest shareholder, to convert its for-profit arm into a public benefit corporation controlled by the remaining nonprofit.

    Elon Musk, who left OpenAI in 2018 and went on to launch his own startup, xAI, has since become one of the company’s fiercest critics. He has filed multiple lawsuits aimed at halting its restructuring and accused the company of straying from its founding mission in favor of profits. Most recently, he sued the company for allegedly hiring former xAI employees who he claims stole trade secrets.

    Secondary share sales gain steam

    Secondary share sales, an increasingly popular method among startups to retain and reward staff, have boosted the valuation of several already highly valued companies. SpaceX reached a $400 billion valuation in July after a round of secondary share sales; Stripe’s February tender offer valued it at $91.5 billion; and Databricks’ December secondary sale gave the company a $62 billion valuation.

    As OpenAI’s tools continue weaving into daily life, the company has had to reckon with the social consequences of its rapid ascent. Earlier this month, it rolled out parental controls for ChatGPT, giving parents options such as limiting their children’s exposure to sensitive content or disabling certain voice and image modes. The feature came after OpenAI was sued in August by the parents of a teenager who committed suicide after ChatGPT allegedly gave him self-harm advice.

    More recently, OpenAI sparked backlash with the launch of Sora, a short-form A.I. video app, drawing criticism that consumer-facing products conflict with its loftier goals of scientific advances and artificial general intelligence (AGI). Altman addressed the criticism on X yesterday (Oct. 1), writing: “It is also nice to show people cool new tech/products along the way, make them smile, and hopefully make some money given all that compute need.”

    He added that most of OpenAI’s resources remain focused on science and AGI research. “When we launched ChatGPT, there was a lot of ‘who needs this and where is AGI?’ Reality is nuanced when it comes to optimal trajectories for a company,” he wrote.

    Sam Altman’s OpenAI Is Officially the World’s Most Valuable Startup at $500B

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    Alexandra Tremayne-Pengelly

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  • Roblox, Scale AI, Databricks Hiring ‘AI Native’ New Grads | Entrepreneur

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    Forget “digital native,” the term that refers to those who began interacting with digital technology at a young age. “AI native” is the new label getting entry-level college graduates six- or seven-figure salaries right out of school — and it’s all about capitalizing on young workers’ ability to use AI.

    According to a Tuesday report from The Wall Street Journal, though the unemployment rate for entry-level workers as a whole was 4.8% in June, higher than the 4% for all workers, companies are still hiring college graduates with AI experience.

    Data analytics firm Databricks, for example, is hiring three times as many recent college graduates this year than last year because of their ability to use AI. The company’s CEO, Ali Ghodsi, told The Journal that some junior staff members having a “big impact” are getting paid a million dollars — and they’re under 25 years old.

    Related: How Much Does Apple Pay Its Employees? Here Are the Exact Salaries of Staff Jobs, Including Developers, Engineers, and Consultants.

    “They’re going to be all AI-native,” Ghodsi told the outlet, referring to the college graduate hires. “We definitely have people, quite junior people, [who] have a big impact, and they’re getting paid a lot. Under 25, you can be making a million.”

    Databricks’ careers page shows that an entry-level AI research scientist working in New York City or San Francisco can make anywhere from $150,000 to $190,000 in base salary.

    Ghodsi isn’t the only tech leader using the term “AI-native.” Scale AI, an AI training service that received a $14.3 billion investment from Meta in June, pays employees right out of college salaries of $200,000 per year, according to The Journal.

    Scale AI’s Head of People, Ashli Shiftan, told the outlet that Scale AI was “eager to hire AI-native professionals, and many of those candidates are early in their careers.”

    Meanwhile, at Roblox, a virtual gaming platform, machine learning engineers with little to no experience can earn more than $200,000 annually, according to salary site Levels.fyi.

    Related: Here’s How Much a Typical Microsoft Employee Makes in a Year

    The market for those with AI experience is divided into two categories, Stanford University Professor of Computer Science Jure Leskovec told The Journal. The first refers to some doctoral students who complete Ph.D. studies in machine learning and AI and receive large offers from companies without any experience.

    The other category encompasses programmers who use AI to become more effective, increasing their value on the job market.

    “It’s almost like a next generation of a software engineer,” Leskovec told the outlet.

    Forget “digital native,” the term that refers to those who began interacting with digital technology at a young age. “AI native” is the new label getting entry-level college graduates six- or seven-figure salaries right out of school — and it’s all about capitalizing on young workers’ ability to use AI.

    According to a Tuesday report from The Wall Street Journal, though the unemployment rate for entry-level workers as a whole was 4.8% in June, higher than the 4% for all workers, companies are still hiring college graduates with AI experience.

    Data analytics firm Databricks, for example, is hiring three times as many recent college graduates this year than last year because of their ability to use AI. The company’s CEO, Ali Ghodsi, told The Journal that some junior staff members having a “big impact” are getting paid a million dollars — and they’re under 25 years old.

    The rest of this article is locked.

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    Sherin Shibu

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