The CEO of a cloud-based data processing and analysis platform says the company is thriving as the market grapples with fears that AI will disrupt the software-as-a-service (SaaS) sector.
In a new post on X, Databricks chief executive Ali Ghodsi says his company’s business has been accelerating quarter after quarter, even as investors debate whether AI will hollow out traditional software models.
Ghodsi says the obvious answer is AI, but the real driver is not simple automation or cost-cutting.
“I now constantly get questions about the SaaS meltdown, role of AI, system of records etc. I don’t have an answer to all these. But I do know that we saw an acceleration in our business in Q2, Q3, and now finished the year with accelerating Q4.
The underlying reason is subtle. We are growing fast because we are finally removing the biggest bottleneck in data: the technical barrier to entry.”
For years, Ghodsi says access to data value was gated by technical skill. If users did not know SQL or Python, they were effectively locked out of analytics and AI workflows.
“That has changed fundamentally with the Genie Family, and it is the ‘secret sauce’ behind our recent momentum:
- Genie: Analysts can query data without any SQL. I use this every day myself.
- Data Science Genie: Builds end-to-end AI models for you, similar to Cursor for ML on your data.
- Data Engineer Genie: Write Spark pipelines, does plumbing, troubleshooting.
We’ve been talking about Data + AI democratization, but generative AI finally enabled it in a way that wasn’t possible before. That’s why we’re seeing a market response.”
According to Ghodsi, the momentum translated into strong year-end metrics.
“All this taken together, we ended up with the following stats for Q4:
- $5.4B Revenue Run-Rate, growing >65% YoY
- $1.4B AI Revenue Run-Rate
- free cash flow positive for the year
- net revenue retention >> 140%.”
Altimeter’s Brad Gerstner recently said that companies that use AI to accelerate their core business will likely emerge as the winners amid the AI-driven software correction. He specifically named Databricks as a contender in the space while predicting that application software will witness lower multiples.
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