Ali Ghodsi, the CEO and cofounder of data intelligence company Databricks, is betting his privately held startup can be the latest addition to the trillion-dollar valuation club.<\/p>\n
In August, Ghodsi told the\u00a0Wall Street Journal <\/a>that he believed Databricks, which is reportedly in talks to raise funding at a $134 billion valuation, had \u201ca shot to be a trillion-dollar company.\u201d At Fortune\u2019s Brainstorm AI conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, he explained how it would happen, laying out a \u201ctrifecta\u201d of growth areas to ignite the company\u2019s next leg of growth.<\/p>\n The first is entering the transactional database market, the traditional territory of large enterprise players like Oracle<\/a>, which Ghodsi said has remained largely \u201cthe same for 40 years.\u201d Earlier this year, Databricks launched a link-based offering called Lakebase, an operational database optimized for AI Agents, in an attempt to capture some of this market.<\/p>\n The company is also seeing growth driven by the rise of AI-powered coding. \u201cOver 80% of the databases that are being launched on Databricks are not being launched by humans, but by AI agents,\u201d Ghodsi said. As developers use AI tools for \u201cvibe coding\u201d\u2014rapidly building software with natural language commands\u2014those applications automatically need databases, and Ghodsi they\u2019re defaulting to Databricks\u2019 platform.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s just a huge growth factor for us. I think if we just did that, we could maybe get all the way to a trillion,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n The second growth area is Agent Bricks, Databricks\u2019 platform for building AI agents that work with proprietary enterprise data.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a commodity now to have AI that has general knowledge,\u201d Ghodsi said, but \u201cit\u2019s very elusive to get AI that really works and understands that proprietary data that\u2019s inside enterprise.\u201d He pointed to the Royal Bank of Canada<\/a>, which built AI agents for equity research analysts, as an example. Ghodsi said these agents were able to automatically gather earnings calls and company information to assemble research reports, reducing \u201cmany days\u2019 worth of work down to minutes.\u201d<\/p>\n And finally, the third piece to Ghodsi\u2019s puzzle involves building applications on top of this infrastructure, with developers using AI tools to quickly build applications that run on Lakebase and which are then powered by AI agents. \u201cTo get the trifecta is also to have apps on top of this. Now you have apps that are vibe coded with the database, Lakebase, and with agents,\u201d Ghodsi said. \u201cThose are three new vectors for us.\u201d<\/p>\n Ghodsi did not provide a timeframe for attaining the trillion-dollar goal. Currently, only a handful of companies have achieved the milestone, all of them as publicly traded companies. In the tech industry, only big tech giants like Apple<\/a>, Microsoft<\/a>, Nvidia<\/a>, Alphabet<\/a>, Amazon<\/a>, and Meta<\/a> have managed to cross the trillion-dollar threshold.<\/p>\n To reach this level would require Databricks, which is widely expected to go public sometime in early 2026, to grow its valuation roughly sevenfold from its current reported level. Part of this journey will likely also include the expected IPO, Ghodsi said. <\/p>\n \u201cThere are huge advantages and pros and cons. That\u2019s why we\u2019re not super religious about it,\u201d Ghodsi said when asked about a potential IPO. \u201cWe will go public at some point. But to us, it\u2019s not a really big deal.\u201d<\/p>\n Could the company IPO next year? Maybe, replied Ghodsi.\n<\/p>\n Join us at the Fortune Workplace Innovation Summit May 19\u201320, 2026, in Atlanta. The next era of workplace innovation is here\u2014and the old playbook is being rewritten. At this exclusive, high-energy event, the world\u2019s most innovative leaders will convene to explore how AI, humanity, and strategy converge to redefine, again, the future of work. Register now<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ali Ghodsi, the CEO and cofounder of data intelligence company Databricks, is betting his privately held startup can…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":177000,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[365,89886,363,364,112387,4037,46038,111,139,69,16782,145,52358,1287],"class_list":{"0":"post-176999","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-app-developers","10":"tag-artificial-intelligence","11":"tag-artificialintelligence","12":"tag-brainstorm-ai","13":"tag-coding","14":"tag-enterprise","15":"tag-new-zealand","16":"tag-newzealand","17":"tag-nz","18":"tag-oracle","19":"tag-technology","20":"tag-valuations","21":"tag-venture-capital"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176999","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=176999"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176999\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/177000"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=176999"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=176999"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=176999"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}