With the rapid development of big data technology, lakehouse architecture has become a hot trend in the field of data infrastructure. As an emerging technology, lakehouse has attracted massive investment from data companies. Two major players in this field, Databricks and Snowflake, have received billions of dollars in funding to develop lakehouse products and grab market share. Their huge funding and soaring valuations reflect investors’ optimism about the lakehouse concept.
Databricks raises $1.6 billion to accelerate Lakehouse adoption
Databricks, founded by the creators of Apache Spark, has cemented its position as a leading lakehouse vendor. It recently raised $1.6 billion in Series H funding, led by Morgan Stanley’s Counterpoint Global, which propelled its valuation to $38 billion. This fresh capital will help Databricks boost innovation in its Lakehouse Platform, which unifies data analytics, data science, data engineering and AI. Databricks aims to replace traditional data warehouses with its Lakehouse architecture. Its Lakehouse vision has struck a chord with investors, as evidenced by its enormous funding and valuation.
Snowflake expands its data cloud with lakehouse features
Snowflake, Databricks’ major competitor, has also jumped on the lakehouse bandwagon. Known for its cloud data warehouse, Snowflake has added more data lake capabilities to create a lakehouse architecture. It launched Snowflake Data Cloud back in 2020 to allow analytics on both structured and semi-structured data. Snowflake also introduced Snowpark, its native application development framework, to simplify Python, Scala and Java development on its platform. While Snowflake came from data warehousing, it has embraced the lakehouse trend to complement its existing product portfolio.
Intensifying competition between Databricks and Snowflake
The race for lakehouse dominance between Databricks and Snowflake is heating up. Both companies have strong war chests thanks to enormous funding rounds. But Databricks aims to directly replace data warehouses like Snowflake’s with its Lakehouse Platform. This pits the two rivals against each other. However, the lakehouse market has ample room for growth, as more customers adopt cloud-based data architectures. Databricks and Snowflake will aggressively compete on product features, performance and partnerships over the coming years.
The massive investments in Databricks and Snowflake highlight the enormous market potential of lakehouse solutions. These two competitors will vie for market leadership as enterprise demand for modern cloud data platforms keeps growing.