Databricks feels the pressure to go public to create liquidity for investors, but it is not committing to any particular timetable for its highly anticipated offering, cofounder and CEO Ali Ghodsi said.

“I understand a lot of people and investors are very focused on when does this one event happen, but I have to live with it for a decade, or two, or three,” Ghodsi told Mergermarket on the sidelines of this week’s Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference in San Francisco.

“We are ready to do it. We can press a button if we want to,” he said.

CFO Dave Conte needs two months to get the company fully prepared for an initial public offering, Ghodsi noted. Conte was hired in October 2019, after having taken Splunk public in 2012 and Loudcloud in 2001.

Ghodsi could not be drawn on whether Databricks would launch an IPO later this year, or in 2025, if stock market conditions are favorable.

One investment banker familiar with Databricks’ strategy estimated its IPO could come in the second half of 2025 or in early 2026. A second banker though thought a listing may occur earlier.

An investor at the conference, who bought shares in Databricks four years ago, said he is anxiously awaiting the day when he can sell his shares on the market for what will be a “very lucrative return.”

Whenever it decides to go public, there will be no shortage of new investors lining up to buy a piece of the company, a Silicon Valley fund manager noted. “Databricks’ IPO will be wild,” he predicted.

In an investor briefing in June, the data intelligence company said it is generating USD 2.4bn in annualized revenue and growing 60%.

Databricks is targeting cash flow profitability in the next 12 to 18 months, a second investor said.

When it prices its shares in a public listing, it will be compared to data companies like Snowflake [NYSE:SNOW] and high-growth enterprise software providers such as Crowdstrike [NASDAQ:CRWD], the first investor and the fund manager said.

Hyperscalers such as Alphabet [NASDAQ:GOOGL], Amazon [NASDAQ:AMZN] and Microsoft [NASDAQ:MSFT] are also likely to be in Databricks’ universe of comps, they added.

Databricks unifies data, analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) on a single platform so that customers can govern, manage and derive insights from enterprise data and build their own generative AI solutions faster.

Earlier this year, Databricks acquired data management provider Tabular for a figure reportedly around USD 2bn. Last year, it purchased generative artificial intelligence platform MosaicML for USD 1.3bn.

Going forward, the San Francisco-based company will “continue to be aggressive” in M&A, according to Ghodsi.

“We must be good at M&A. There is no great company out there that did not do lots of acquisitions,” the CEO said, citing Google’s acquisitions of Android in 2005 and Deep Mind in 2014 as transformative examples.

Databricks targets businesses with competitive advantages in adjacent product areas, he said. It also regularly looks for acqui-hires to add talent to its software engineering teams, Ghodsi added.

A few months after its acquisition of MosaicML, Databricks raised more than USD 500m at a USD 43bn valuation led by funds advised by T. Rowe Price, which was joined by other existing investors such as Andreessen Horowitz, Baillie Gifford, ClearBridge, Counterpoint Global, Fidelity, Franklin Templeton, GIC, Octahedron Capital and Tiger Global.

The raise included new investors Capital One Ventures, Ghisallo Capital Management, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan and Nvidia.

The second investor said Databricks’ valuation makes sense after its acquisition of MosaicML. Combining its data platform with Mosaic’s generative AI processing capabilities is powerful, he said, as it defines Databricks as “a truly gen AI company making user friendly enterprise products.”

by Troy Hooper in San Francisco with additional reporting from Cristiano Dalla Bona in New York