One of the venture capitalists leading the deal told TechCrunch that it's been a wild week for investors trying to get in on Databricks' record-breaking $10 billion fundraising.

George Mathew, managing director of Insight Partners, said with a grin: "There have been calls that have gone on late into the night and that's okay, that's how good deals come up." Insight was one of six firms that led the deal, along with new investor Joshua Kushner's company Thrive. Everyone except Thrive were existing investors.

“Even though we were already an investor on the cap table, we worked to make sure we could be co-leaders,” Mathew said. Insight first invested in Databricks in 2021. But to get into the massive deal, Insight had to tap Insight Partners Public Equities, a fund set up to buy publicly traded stocks under chief executive John Wolff.

There was so much interest that allocation and valuation increased rapidly. In mid-November, the deal was expected to be worth around $8 billion. Reuters reported In that case. A few days later, it reached $9.5 billion at a $60 billion valuation, and on Tuesday, It closed at 62 billion dollars and 10 billion dollars valuation.

In terms of perspective, this is bigger OpenAI's $6.6 billion raise in OctoberThe biggest venture tour of all time.

“There was a lot of corporate demand and interest in a company that has been around for generations,” Mathew said. “I have been an investor in all things data, AI and machine learning at Insight for the last four years. This is what I live for.”

The investment included a large secondary tender offer in which Databricks employees or other existing investors could sell their shares. New preferred shares were issued to the new investor. Databricks did not specify how much of the increase was secondary, other than calling the $10 billion amount "non-dilutive," meaning a good amount.

Interestingly, Databricks, founded in 2013, could have been a tragic story. Ten years ago, its founders created a technology called Spark that was key to the “big data” trend of yesteryear. Spark helped organizations analyze their on-premises big data super fast.

With the rise of data hosted in the cloud, the company was processing the data and then transferring it to other players. He could slowly find himself relegated to an irrelevant big data feature.

Databricks co-founder and CEO Ali Ghodsi (pictured) sought advice from Mathew, who ran big data company Alteryx as COO before becoming a VC. The two had been friends since the early days of Databricks.

“Ali called me a few years ago and said: 'Hey, I'm thinking of getting into the data warehouse market.' And I said, 'This is the stupidest idea I've ever heard.' And I couldn't have been more wrong,” laughs Mathew, adding that he's happy Ghodsi didn't listen to him or use his bad advice against him.

At the time, traditional data warehouse vendors, which store large amounts of enterprise data used for analytics, were also struggling with products owned by rising cloud stars like Snowflake and cloud vendors like AWS's Redshift.

But in late 2020, Databricks launched Databricks SQL is already a data warehouse product and has quickly become a major competitor to Snowflake.

Then came large language models (LLMs), which needed consistently high-quality enterprise data. “Where does this high-quality data come from? Corporately, it will come from somewhere like Databricks, Mathew said.

Fast forward to late 2024, when the IPO market is still locked in and investors are eager to get their hands on a piece of AI infrastructure product, like data warehouses that can serve LLMs.

Databricks says By the end of its fourth fiscal quarter, Databricks said SQL would reach a revenue stream rate of $3 billion, with revenue growth of $600 million, up 150% year over year.