On Monday, Databricks announced it reached a $5.4 billion revenue run rate, growing 65% year-over-year, of which more than $1.4 billion was from its AI products.
Co-founder and CEO Ali Ghodsi wanted to share these growth numbers because there’s so much talk about how AI is going to 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 with all these companies?’ For us, it’s just increasing the usage,” he said.
To be sure, he also wants to distance Databricks from the SaaS label, given that private markets value it as an AI company. Databricks on Monday also officially closed on its massive, previously announced $5 billion raise at a $134 billion valuation, and nabbed a $2 billion loan facility as well.
But the company is straddling both worlds. Databricks is still best known as a cloud data warehouse provider. A data warehouse is where enterprises store massive amounts of data to analyze for business insights.
Ghodsi called out, in particular, one AI product that’s driving usage of its data warehouse: its LLM user interface named Genie.
Genie is an example of how a SaaS business can replace its user interface with natural language. For instance, he uses it to ask why warehouse usage and revenue spike on particular days.
Just a few years ago, such a request required writing queries in a specific technical language, or having a special report programmed. Today, any product with an LLM interface can be used by anyone, Ghodsi noted. Genie is one reason for the company’s usage growth numbers, he said.
The threat of AI to SaaS isn’t, as one AI VC jokingly tweeted, that enterprises will rip out their SaaS “systems of record” to replace them with vibe-coded homegrown versions. Systems of record store critical business data, whether it’s on sales, customer support, or finance.
“Why would you move your system of record? You know, it’s hard to move it,” Ghodsi said.
The model makers aren’t offering databases to store that data and become systems of record anyway. Instead, they hope to replace the user interface with natural lang …