Data analytics software startup Databricks said Wednesday that Meta has signed on as an investor.
As the company that trains the popular Llama open-source large language models, or LLMs, that Databricks builds on, Meta plays an important role in the artificial intelligence. Databricks works closely with Meta’s Llama team, the startup’s co-founder and CEO, Ali Ghodsi, said in an interview this week.
The relationship goes all the way up to Meta co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
“We’ve discussed open-source software in the past, and he cares a lot about open-source models and Llama,” Ghodsi said.
Meta doesn’t invest in nearly as many startups as technology peers Alphabet and Microsoft. But Databricks has been a fast-growing company on a path to a major initial public offering. Meta invested in a $10 billion round for Databricks, one of the largest investments in the history of venture capital. Databricks has now raised $14 billion in venture funding.
The new money will go toward global expansion and liquidity for current and former employees.
On Wednesday Databricks also announced a $5.25 billion credit facility led by JPMorgan Chase. Credit can be a much better option than spending with stock and diluting existing shareholders, even with a high interest rate, Ghodsi said.
The money in the bank did enable Databricks last year to train its own open-source LLM called DBRX, at a cost of about $10 million. DBRX performed better than Meta’s Llama and other alternatives in some tests at the time, but other models quickly surpassed it.
That’s one reason it was reasonable for Databricks to ally itself with the most prominent open model builder. Meta has plenty of money to spend on capital expenditures to train models, and Databricks can use its money in other way, Ghodsi said.
He wouldn’t specify whether Meta is a client.
San Francisco-based Databricks now employs 8,000 people. Ghodsi said it would not be “a huge surprise to me if we were public” a year from now.
Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund, the Qatar Investment Authority, participated in the $10 billion round alongside Meta. Ghodsi said Databricks is open to allowing its software to run on data centers from major operators in the Middle East. Today, it’s only available through the Amazon, Google and Microsoft clouds.