Scale Faster with Data + AI: Insights from the Databricks Unicorns Index

Every day, from fintech innovations to health tech accelerants to breakthrough applications, Databricks powers thousands of high-growth startups worldwide. With our recent $1 million Databricks Generative AI Startup Challenge celebrating our finalists, we wanted to understand: What happens when startups harness the full potential of Databricks?

To find out more we dove into Crunchbase's proprietary private company intelligence. Our analysis of Crunchbase Unicorn and Emerging Unicorn data reveals a compelling story: Companies using Databricks consistently outperform their peers in revenue growth. Let's explore why Databricks-powered unicorns are leading the pack and how the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform creates this competitive edge.

Defining the Databricks Unicorn Index

Today, there are over 1,500 unicorns worldwide, representing private companies valued at over $1 billion. Using a mix of Crunchbase proprietary data and signals that help make sense of the private market and Databricks insights, we created the Databricks Unicorn Index to analyze the financial outcomes of unicorns using Databricks versus those who don’t. Here’s what we found:

Better Financial Outcomes

Databricks-enabled unicorns generally show higher revenue ranges, with a greater presence in revenue brackets above $100M compared to non-Databricks companies. For example, 30% of Databricks-using unicorns sit in the $100M—$500M range, while only 11% of unicorns not using Databricks occupy this range. This correlation suggests that startups investing in Databricks are more likely to reach higher revenue brackets, underscoring Databricks' role as an accelerant for translating data and AI into financial growth.

Emerging Unicorn Trends  

Emerging unicorns using Databricks follow a similar trend, with a strong presence in higher revenue ranges. For example, 36% of Databricks-enabled emerging unicorns fall in the $100M—$500M range, compared to just 13% of companies not using Databricks. This trend highlights Databricks as a platform that supports startups–even more so on the uncertain path of rapid growth milestones required to reach the coveted unicorn status.

Success Stories: Startups Powered by Databricks

Startups across industries scale faster with Databricks. Unicorns and emerging unicorns share firsthand the transformative benefits they’ve realized using Databricks. Here are a few of our favorites:

Unicorns 

Databricks has helped Grammarly foster a data-driven culture where employees get fast access to analytics without having to write complex queries, all while maintaining Grammarly’s enterprise-grade security practices. 

At Outreach, they use Databricks to create a single source of truth for customer behavior throughout the sales process and seller activity. With the Databrics Data Intelligence Platform, they realized a 40% reduction in cloud costs and a 20%+ increase in team productivity–from faster onboarding, easier collaboration and streamlined pipeline and model development.

Fanatics Betting & Gaming turned to AWS and Databricks to create an industry-changing, machine learning Solution that proactively identifies problematic gaming behaviors and better protects their at-risk customers.

Databricks underpins the SEEDesign™ technology platform at Inari Agriculture. They built their data platform in record time to enable efficient, impactful decision-making, advancing their mission to transform global agriculture. 

As a fellow unicorn, we’d be remiss not to highlight some of the ways Databricks runs on a Databricks Data Intelligence Platform. At the recent Data + AI Summit, the Databricks Data Engineering team shared how they enable the right people to have access to the assets and resources needed to accomplish a specific purpose with unified data governance. 

Emerging Unicorns

Korea Credit Data uses Databricks to analyze business data, allowing business owners to make informed financial decisions. Their Cashnote app, used by 1.4 million business owners, provides insights into credit card sales and credit score management. With Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, they optimized data processing, reducing costs by 90% and improving user satisfaction. 

Labelbox which empowers the efficient development of AI technologies, needed to build a consumption-based billing system without data ingestion becoming a bottleneck. They implemented the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform to help Labelbox handle real-time streaming data ingestion, enhancing their AI training processes and streamlining workflows.

Otrium drives e-commerce growth by leveraging the Fivetran platform with Databricks, enhancing data management and analysis. This integration allows Otrium to track customer journeys, optimize pricing through competitor analysis and predict product returns. 

PocketFM won the Databricks Data + AI Transformation Award, which celebrates the team that delivers new use cases, innovative outcomes, and increased value while democratizing access to data and insights.

Karius has developed a liquid biopsy test for infectious diseases, using innovations across chemistry, data and AI to detect pathogens non-invasively. They use Databricks for advanced analytics and insights from complex datasets, improving their diagnostic capabilities.

GumGum uses Databricks on advanced machine learning workflows to enhance contextual digital advertising. The Databricks Data Intelligence Platform helps GumGum process massive datasets efficiently, enabling real-time ad inventory forecasting and optimization.

Tide uses machine learning models to assess risk levels during various stages of customer interaction, including account sign-up, ongoing customer transactions and real-time transaction screenings. Databricks proves a robust platform for scaling these models and ensures quick responses to potential threats. 

ClearBank scaled its operations thanks to a robust cloud platform that includes Azure Databricks. The transition to a cloud-first approach has enabled ClearBank to process 20 million payments monthly, enhancing its service offerings.

Tredence partners with Databricks to deliver cutting-edge data and AI solutions. As a Databricks Elite Partner, Tredence leverages the Databricks Data Intelligent Platform and its industry-specific Brickbuilder solutions, such as ATOM.AI, to accelerate digital transformation for Fortune 100 companies.

These companies exemplify how Databricks accelerates growth by equipping startups with a scalable framework for activating data intelligence across their pipelines, applications and analytics.

Growth Capabilities Empowered by Databricks Data Intelligence

What drives these standout results? Here’s a cheat sheet of how these fast-growing companies use the Databricks top growth-enabling capabilities:

Maximized ROI from Data  

Databricks enables companies to monetize data or enhance analytics by integrating internal and external datasets. This drives better insights and faster decision-making, delivering a higher return on data investments. At Collective Health, one of their numerous offerings is the Premier Partner Program™, built on the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform. Collective Health uses Delta Live Tables and Data Streaming to make sharing data at scale with their partners easier.

Unified Platform for Innovation  

Databricks consolidates ETL, orchestration, warehousing and AI tools into a single platform, allowing startups to innovate faster and more cost-effectively. For companies like GumGum, the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform built on lakehouse has allowed the GumGum team to accelerate their data processing and reporting capabilities by 5x while reducing the infrastructure cost by 2x.

Improved Collaboration and Data Sharing  

Features like Delta Sharing facilitate secure, real-time data sharing, which is crucial for startups collaborating with partners or leveraging third-party data. Outreach partners with Databricks for Delta Sharing to securely share live sales data across clouds and regions. This integration enables Outreach to combine sales data with other datasets for actionable insights, improving sales cycles and marketing effectiveness.

Data Democratization 

By offering universal access to data, Databricks empowers all teams to use data for insights, fueling a data-driven culture and enabling everyone in the organization to make informed decisions. Using the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, Grammarly’s engineering teams have a tailored, centralized platform to make its 5 billion daily events available for analytics in under 15 minutes rather than 4 hours.

Advanced Data Management and Governance  

Databricks provides fine-grained access control and reliable data governance with tools like Unity Catalog and Delta Lake. With Unity Catalog, startups can govern structured and unstructured data in any format, as well as machine learning models, notebooks, dashboards, and files across any cloud or platform. The new Data Engineering team at Inari hit the ground running with Databicks helping to streamline data ingestion, transformation and governance.

Start Your Success Story with Databricks

In today’s fast-moving landscape, agile data and AI solutions are no longer optional—they’re essential. The Databricks Data Intelligence Platform empowers unicorns with the tools to unlock the full potential of their data, accelerate innovation and achieve financial success. For startups looking to scale and seize new revenue opportunities, Databricks is the ultimate partner for growth.

Discover how Databricks can fuel your startup’s growth with data and AI. Learn more here.

Crunchbase is a private company intelligence platform built on proprietary data and AI that helps dealmakers find and act on the right private companies. To learn more visit about.crunchbase.com and follow Crunchbase on LinkedIn and X.