Databricks said on Thursday it has signed a term sheet for a strategic funding round that values the company at US$188 billion.

The data analytics software firm said it expects to close the funding round later this summer. It is being led by existing investor Coatue and will include both new and existing investors, Databricks added.

New capital earned will be used by Databricks to accelerate its AI strategy. It said it will “double down” on Unity AI Gateway, its multi-AI governance solution that helps businesses govern and control costs of their AI. It will also accelerate Genie, its AI coworker, and Lakebase, its severless Postgres database built for AI agents.

In addition to fuelling its continued AI growth, this capital is expected to support future AI acquisitions by Databricks and deepen its AI research abilities.

The news comes as enterprise AI reckons with a context gap, Databricks explained. As a result, many organisations are unable to leverage AI at scale and see genuine return on investment (ROI).

“Today, data is often scattered across systems, disconnected from AI and difficult to govern, leaving teams unable to control AI’s cost, security and reliability,” the company said via a press release.

It hopes that the Databricks Data + AI Platform will be well-positioned to solve these challenges, particularly with additional funding. The company said it will continue to unify data and AI on its agent-ready infrastructure, governing AI costs and access and delivering the business context teams need to build and deploy the technology successfully.

“Enterprises are moving from tokenmaxxing to valuemaxxing. They don’t want to burn expensive tokens on the smartest model for every task – they want the best outcome per dollar. That means having the freedom to choose the right AI for the job,” said Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and CEO of Databricks.

“This new capital lets us keep pushing our multi-AI strategy forward to meet massive customer demand, so we can keep strengthening Unity AI Gateway, expanding Genie and advancing Lakebase.”

This news comes at the same time as Databricks announcing Genie One, a new agentic coworker that is designed to help business teams automate and orchestrate their work across any data – structured or unstructured, analytical or operational, inside or outside Databricks.

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