There’s a peculiar sort of dance that late-stage startups have to perform when they go looking for capital. Often, they end up selling more equity than they’d prefer, or risk alienating the venture backers who’ve been with them from the start.

“We wanted to raise $1 billion, but then The Information printed this article saying that Databricks is doing a big fundraise. They did that in the middle of our conference. We were heads down with our conference, and we were not actually at all focused on fundraising,” Ghodsi recalled, referring to a conference that took place in June. “As soon as that article went out, there was a long line of investors that started calling. My phone blew up. It was like the worst timing for us because we were busy with our conference,” he said.

It was the kind of problem most founders would envy—one that turned a news report into a self-fulfilling prophecy. “The interest level was just insane. Just from this select group of investors that we looked at, there was $15 billion of interest,” he said. When demand runs that hot, telling longtime supporters they can’t get a piece of the deal is a surefire way to breed resentment. So Databricks chose to issue additional stock, and in July, it put out a press release announcing the close of its new round at a $188 billion valuation. (At the time, the company didn’t disclose how much it had raised.)

On Thursday, Databricks revealed it had pulled in $5 billion from a roster of VCs allowed into the deal, with its valuation climbing to a clean $190 billion. The round was spearheaded by Coatue, with participation from Blackstone, MGX, various accounts tied to T. Rowe Price, and newcomer Sixth Street Growth—the firm launched by former Goldman Sachs chief investment officer Alan Waxman. Roughly two dozen VCs were named as participants.

So why the stampede? Databricks looks like a safe bet. Ghodsi said the company has reached $7 billion in annualized run-rate revenue, currently expanding at 80% and generating positive cash flow. Its flagship cloud data warehouse contributes $1.5 billion of that run-rate and is still growing 100% year-over-year, he noted. Then there’s the AI allure. Its agent-focused database, Lakebase, launched in June 2025, has already hit a $100 million revenue run-rate. And its AI chatbot tool, Genie, which performs on-the-spot business analysis, “is insanely popular,” he said.

If business is booming, why keep raising? The company has already amassed $20 billion over the past 20 months. AI doesn’t come cheap, Ghodsi explained. Databricks holds multi-billion-dollar cloud commitments with all three major hyperscalers. On top of that, “AI research is very expensive,” he said, pointing to a 100-person AI research team in a fiercely competitive field. And Databricks is also on the hunt. “We do a lot of M&A,” Ghodsi said, citing the acquisition announced this week of Electric, the company behind the lightweight Postgres database PGlite, which lets agents spin up databases quickly (terms weren’t disclosed). In June, it snapped up AI cybersecurity firm Panther; in March, it acquired two more startups.

There was a time when a $1 billion round was seen as a monumental, grueling feat. In today’s AI spending frenzy—where startups land $1 billion seed rounds out of the gate—that figure feels almost trivial. Still, Databricks’ choice to keep raising privately instead of going public has become something of a running joke in the Valley. When it announced this round last month, wags online noted it had raised so many times that it was running out of letters in the alphabet.

Ghodsi told CNBC he still intends to take the company public eventually. With such a sprawling list of investors who’ll eventually want to cash out, what else could he promise? But for now, his focus is on pouring money into AI, he said. Given the costs involved, staying out of the public spotlight might be the smarter play. And when he can drum up $15 billion in interest on his own terms, why rush?