Ali Ghodsi on IPO
From Databricks CEO: We Don't Need AI To Get Smarter · · Bloomberg Technology
“We will also be a public company. I just think... Because, you know, at our scale, you know, I think we raised $20,000,000,000. At these scales, we're almost trying to create a market transaction mechanism for our employees, which, you know, it's 10,000 right now. But if you take all of them, the prior employees, it's probably 14,000 or so. You know? So there is a thing that can do that. It's called the public markets. So I just think this is a terrible year for you know, to go public.”
On , Ali Ghodsi, Cofounder and CEO at Databricks, spoke about IPO during Databricks CEO: We Don't Need AI To Get Smarter on Bloomberg Technology.
About Ali Ghodsi
Ali Ghodsi, cofounder and CEO of Databricks, has appeared at several events in mid-2026 discussing the company's strategy, fundraising, and views on artificial intelligence. In June, he addressed Databricks' recent $5 billion equity raise at a $134 billion valuation, stating that the company is seeing "acceleration in all of our business" and that he does not rule out raising additional private capital before a potential IPO. He described 2026 as "a terrible year" to go public due to macroeconomic uncertainty and the scale of other large IPOs, but said Databricks will eventually become a public company to provide liquidity for its approximately 14,000 current and former employees. Ghodsi emphasized that Databricks is free cash flow positive and does not need to burn capital, allowing the company to choose its own timing for an IPO. Ghodsi has repeatedly argued that artificial intelligence has reached the level of artificial general intelligence but lacks context, not intelligence. He stated, "We don't need AI to get smarter. It just is lacking context," and described the problem as "how do we feed it that context? And that context is in the data." He promoted Databricks' "Lakehouse" as a system of record for AI agents and highlighted the product "Genie," a conversational AI tool that uses an ontology graph to answer quantitative questions. At the RSA Conference in April, Ghodsi introduced the "open security lakehouse" architectural pattern, advocating for organizations to store data in open formats in their own cloud accounts to avoid vendor lock-in. He also noted that open-source and Chinese AI models are "absolutely dominating" and that the lifespan of frontier AI models has shortened to less than a quarter.