AI firms Databricks and Cognition have vaulted into the highest tier of artificial intelligence startups, pulling in billions from top venture firms as investor appetite shows no signs of cooling.
Databricks closed a $1 billion round that values the San Francisco software company above $100 billion, while Cognition secured $400 million at a $10.2 billion valuation, reports Bloomberg.
The combined tally tops $110 billion, underscoring the scale of money pouring into AI’s infrastructure and applications.
Databricks makes software that helps companies organize massive piles of information and then use it to train and run AI. The firm is now moving into databases — the systems that power day-to-day business tasks like sales, orders, and payments. The shift could tie AI more directly into how businesses actually operate.
Chief executive Ali Ghodsi says this new focus will drive the company’s next wave of growth. Databricks already reports $4 billion in yearly revenue run rate, with $1 billion coming from AI tools alone.
Cognition is known for its coding assistant called Devin, promoted as the first “AI software engineer.” It can write, test, and fix code on its own. In less than a year, Devin’s recurring revenue jumped from $1 million to $73 million, showing how quickly customers are adopting it.
Says Cognition CEO Scott Wu,
“As the game gets bigger and bigger and bigger, it’s very valuable to have the capital. There’s a lot of work to do on go-to-market and much more to do on research and model training as well.”
Wu says the aim is simple: build AI tools that become part of every company’s daily workflow.
“We have a very, very intense culture and that’s a lot of what we are, and obviously it is not for everyone.”
Cognition now counts banks and tech firms among its customers, while Databricks pushes further into business infrastructure.