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Monday, Databricks he announced it reached $5.4 billion in revenue, growing 65% year-on-year, of which more than $1.4 billion came from its AI products.
Founder Ali Ghodsi wanted to share these statistics because there is a lot of talk about how AI will kill the SaaS business, he told TechCrunch.
“Everybody’s like, ‘Oh, it’s SaaS. What’s going to happen to all these companies? What’s AI going to do to all these companies? For us, it’s just increasing usability,” he says.
In fact, they also want to disrupt the SaaS brand from Databricks, its value as it is with niche markets such as the AI ​​company. Databricks on Monday also officially closed on its expansion, which it previously announced at $ 5 billion at a cost of $ 134 billionand also acquired a loan of 2 billion dollars.
But the company is struggling with both countries. Databricks is still widely recognized as a cloud data warehouse provider. A data warehouse is where businesses store large amounts of data to analyze business information.
Ghodsi called out, in particular, one AI product that is running his inventory: his LLM feature called Genie.
Genie is an example of how a SaaS business can do it change its user interface and natural language. For example, they use it to ask why the museum is overcrowded and how much money there is on certain days.
A few years ago, such a request would have required specific question language, or perhaps a separate report would have been prepared. Today, anything with an LLM interface can be used by anyone, Ghodsi said. Genie is one reason for the increase in users, he said.
The threat of AI to SaaS is not, like one AI VC wrote humorouslythat businesses will tear up SaaS “Systems of Record” to replace vibe-coded homegrown versions. A system of record stores important business data, whether for sales, customer service, or finance.
“How can you move your style? You know, it’s hard to move,” Ghodsi said.
The model makers are not providing a database to store the data and are recording systems. Instead, they hope to replace the user interface with natural language for human use, or APIs or other support plugins.
The reason for the threat to SaaS businesses, Ghodsi says, is that people no longer use their services to be masters of other things: Salesforce experts, or ServiceNow, or SAP. When the form is just language, the objects are invisible, like pipes.
“Millions of people around the world were trained in user interaction. And this was the biggest stream that those businesses had,” Ghodsi warns.
SaaS companies that embrace the new LLM format can grow, as Databricks is doing. But it also opens up opportunities for AI competitors to offer alternatives that work better with AI and assistants.
That’s why Databricks created its Lakebase database specifically for developers. He sees an early attraction. “In the eight months we’ve been on the market, it’s doubled the amount our museum had in eight months. Well, obviously, it’s like comparing young children,” says Ghodsi. “But this is a little boy who is twice as old.”
Meanwhile, since Databricks has closed on its capital investment, Ghodsi tells us that the company is not immediately working on another raise, or preparing for an IPO.
“This is not a good time to go public,” Ghodsi said. “I just wanted to have more money,” in case the markets go “south” again like they did in the 2022 crash after ZIRP. A large bank account “protects us, it gives us many years of flight,” he added.
