Technology

Databricks is a SaaS business built on top of a bunch of open-source tools, and apparently itbeen going pretty well on the business side of things. In fact, the company claims to be one of the fastest growing enterprise cloud companies ever. Today the company announced a massive $400 million Series F funding round on a hefty $6.2 billion valuation. Todayfunding brings the total raised to almost a $900 million.

Andreessen Horowitz Late Stage Venture Fund led the round with new investors BlackRock, Inc., T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc. and Tiger Global Management also participating. The institutional investors are particularly interesting here because as a late-stage startup, Databricks likely has its eye on a future IPO, and having those investors on board already could give them a head start.

CEO Ali Ghodsi was coy when it came to the IPO, but it sure sounded like thata direction he wants to go. &We are one of the fastest growing cloud enterprise software companies on record, which means we have a lot of access to capital as this fundraise shows. The revenue is growing gangbusters, and the brand is also really well known. So an IPO is not something that we&re optimizing for, but itsomething thatdefinitely going to happen down the line in the not-too-distant future,& Ghodsi told TechCrunch.

The company announced as of Q3 iton a $200 million run rate, and it has a platform that consists of four products, all built on foundational open source: Delta Lake, an open-source data lake product; MLflow, an open-source project that helps data teams operationalize machine learning; Koalas, which creates a single machine framework for Spark and Pandos, greatly simplifying working with the two tools; and, finally, Spark, the open-source analytics engine.

You can download the open-source version of all of these tools for free, but they are not easy to use or manage. The way that Databricks makes money is by offering each of these tools in the form of Software as a Service. They handle all of the management headaches associated with using these tools and they charge you a subscription price.

Ita model that seems to be working, as the company is growing like crazy. Itraised $250 million just last February on a $2.75 billion valuation. Apparently the investors saw room for a lot more growth in the intervening six months, as today$6.2 billion valuation shows.

California is in the midst of a serious housing crisis with ramifications that stretch across the state. In the Bay Area, the crisis is often at its most visible due to the presence of tech mega-corps and the influx of highly paid tech workers that have exacerbated the problem.

It hasn&t been uncommon for some of these huge tech companies to take some responsibility for the issues and invest back into organizations seeking to promote affordable housing. In Seattle, Microsoft and Amazon have announced initiatives. In the Bay Area, Google recently announced a $1 billion 10-year-plan — and now Facebook is doing the same.

In a blog post attributed to Facebook CFO David Wehner, the company announced they&ve set aside $1 billion to tackle affordable housing; they&re hoping this initiative will lead to the creation of &up to 20,000 new housing units.&

This, of course, isn&t going to be some lump-sum check sent to the California government; itdivvied up into a few different initiatives:

• California state: $250 million is being devoted to a partnership with the California state government to subsidize development on excess state-owned land &where housing is scarce.&
• Bay Area: A $225 million chunk of the commitment is the value of Facebook-owned land that has been zoned for housing in Menlo Park. An additional $150 million is being contributed to The BayFuture Fund, an affordable housing investment fund. And $25 million is going to help fund housing construction for essential workers in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties.
• California and elsewhere: The last major chunk, $350 million, is being set aside for &additional commitments& to the other listed initiatives, as well as new efforts to address housing issues near Facebook offices outside of California.

For its part, the California government seems appreciative to have some help from major companies, though even hundreds of millions in aid is a drop in the bucket for how badly the California state government has mismanaged this issue.

&State government cannot solve housing affordability alone, we need others to join Facebook in stepping up & progress requires partnership with the private sector and philanthropy to change the status quo and address the cost crisis our state is facing,& a statement attributed to California Governor Gavin Newsom reads.

Transportation services giant Penske Corp. is backing a new car-sharing service called Penske Dash that launched Tuesday in Washington, D.C. and Arlington, Va.

The service is debuting at an awkward time for the industry. While some car-sharing operations, particularly peer-to-peer services, have expanded, others have struggled in the past year.GMMaven, BMWReachNow, Car2Go and Lime are among the car-sharing companies that have scaled back or closed their businesses altogether.

In May, GM scaled back its Maven car-sharing company and stopped service in eight markets. BMWReachNow service shut down so abruptly in Seattle and Portland that customers were still using the cars when the announcement was made. Meanwhile,transportation startup Lime closed its LimePod car-sharing service after less than a year of operations in Seattle and Car2Go pulled out of five North American cities.

Despite these headwinds, Penske Corp. Chairman Roger Penske seems keen to jump into the business.

&Penske Dash furthers our commitment to embrace new technologies while addressing the mobility needs for our consumers,&Roger Penske said in a statement, adding that the company intends to &remain at the forefront of new leading transportation solutions.&

Local operations will be led by Paul Delong, who previously served as president and CEO of Car2Go North America.

Penske Dash gives customers access to a fleet of Volkswagen Jetta SE vehicles that can be rented by the minute, hour or day through the app. The rental rates, which are $0.45 a minute or $15 an hour, include fuel, parking and insurance. Members are also supported with 24/7 access to a call center and a local fleet operations team.

Penske Dash describes itself as &free-floating,& although within Washington, D.C. ita bit more constrained than some other services that allow customers to park anywhere within a geographic area. Customers can park their Penske Dash vehicle in a public, unrestricted, street parking space in Arlington identified by Penske Dash. In Washington, D.C., customers must park in a parking spot marked by a Penske Dash sign in approved garages or lots, according to rules stated on its website.

Ridecell, a transportation software company, is providing the platform for the app. The startup, which developed a cloud-based mobility platform designed to help car-sharing, ridesharing and autonomous technology companies manage their vehicles, raised $60 million in a Series B round in late 2018.