This Series L round would value the company at $134 billion, up 34% from its last session of funding during the summer, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported Tuesday (Dec. 16).

Ali Ghodsi, Databricks’ co-founder and CEO, told the WSJ the company plans to use the new funding to invest in its core data-analytics products and AI software, while also letting its workers engage in secondary share sales.

The company, among the most valuable private firms in Silicon Valley, also plans to hire around 600 fresh college graduates in 2026, the CEO added, in addition to adding thousands of new jobs worldwide in Asia, Latin America and Europe. It also plans to hire AI researchers, who are typically paid top salaries, the WSJ added.

The report noted that Databricks has benefited from the AI boom, which relies partially on private corporate data to customize AI models. Databricks told the WSJ that its data-warehousing product, which can serve as an underlying data platform for AI services, surpassed a $1 billion revenue run rate at the end of October.

This year has seen Databricks ink deals with OpenAI and Anthropic to help sell AI services to business customers. Each of these partnerships are designed to push clients to develop AI agents, or independent bots that can carry out tasks on behalf of humans.

The company’s new funding round comes three months after Databricks’ Series K round, which valued it more than $100 billion, up from $62 billion at the start of the year.

In other AI news, PYMNTS wrote earlier this week about The General Intelligence Company of New York, a start up developing agent-based systems designed to take over large portions of company operations.

“The company’s name deliberately evokes Gilded Age ambition, and founder Andrew Pignanelli told PYMNTS that the reference was intentional,” that report said. “He said he views AI as foundational infrastructure for the next era of company-building, much as railroads and industrial capital reshaped the United States economy more than a century ago.”

The company started by working backward from “the one-person billion-dollar business,” as Pignanelli termed it.

“We started at the end, the actual one-person billion-dollar company, and worked our way back and we were like, ‘What can we do today?’” he said.

The Coalition of App Fairness (CAF) on Monday (Dec. 15) issued an open letter to the European Commission (EC) accusing the tech giant of “persistent” non-compliance with Europe’s Digital Markets Act (DMA).

The letter follows findings from the EC that Apple had violated the DMA by keeping developers from directing users to alternative payment methods, fining the tech giant $588 million.

Apple in turn revised its terms for its app store to impose fees that ranged from from 13% for smaller businesses to up to 20% for App Store purchases. However, the CAF says Apple has not addressed what it calls a core issue: the company’s fees are preventing fair competition.

“The law says that gatekeepers like Apple must allow developers to offer and conduct transactions outside of the App Store free of charge,” the letter said. “However, Apple is now charging developers commission, fees of up to 20% for such transactions. This is a blatant disregard for the law with the potential to vanquish years of meaningful work by the Commission.”

The CAF also notes that Apple plans to introduce new terms and conditions for the App Store next month, and says it suspects the new terms will include fees that violate the DMA.

“Apple cannot be permitted to exploit its gatekeeper position by holding the entire industry hostage,” the letter added.

PYMNTS has contacted Apple for comment but has not yet gotten a reply. The company had in September called on the commission to rethink the DMA, which was created to prevent market abuse by tech giants doing business in Europe.

“Over that time, it’s become clear that the DMA is leading to a worse experience for Apple users in the EU,” Apple wrote in a blog post. “It’s exposing them to new risks, and disrupting the simple, seamless way their Apple products work together. And as new technologies come out, our European users’ Apple products will only fall further behind.”

In its blog post, Apple argued the DMA requirements for allowing other app marketplaces and alternative payment systems don’t take into account the privacy and security standards of the App Store, putting customers at risk for being overcharged or scammed.

“The DMA also lets other companies request access to user data and core technologies of Apple products,” the company wrote. “Apple is required to meet almost every request, even if they create serious risks for our users.”

The value of assets by these groups — which include private credit providers, hedge funds and insurance companies — grew at more than twice the rate of assets in the banking industry during 2024, the Financial Stability Board (FSB) said in a report Tuesday (Dec. 16).

In 2024, the report said, the non-bank financial institution (NBFI) sector grew by 9.4%, while the banking sector grew by 4.7%. The NBFI space increased its total assets to 51% ($256.8 trillion) of total global financial assets, compared to $191 trillion for banks.

Still, the banking and NBFI worlds are increasingly interconnected, the report said, “broadening the channels through which shocks can propagate across sectors and jurisdictions.”

In addition, the FSB flagged “severe limitations in the availability of data for private credit in statistical and regulatory reports,” in part because “there was no standard definition of private credit activities” between countries, making it tough to identify them.

According to the FSB, the jurisdictions covered in the report identified a “diverse set of non-bank entities engaging in private finance.” This included private credit groups along with trust companies, finance companies, structured finance vehicles, insurers and pension funds.

The report comes a little less than a month after the FSB held a meeting in which its members discussed efforts to bolster the NFBI sector’s resilience.

“Members noted that nonbank entities are increasingly important participants in the markets for government debt, but their use of highly leveraged trading strategies could amplify market volatility and instability, potentially across borders, in the event of a rapid unwinding of positions,” the FSB said in a news release at the time.

The FSB isn’t the only group concerned about this sector. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) in April issued a report highlighting trouble in the private lending space.

Upward of 40% of the companies who borrowed from these lenders had, at the end of last year, negative cash flow from their operations, the IMF’s Global Financial Stability report found.

And as covered here in May, data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston shows that large banks’ total commitments to private credit (PC) and private equity funds came to $300 billion as of the end of 2023, up from less than $10 billion in 2013.

When these firms are hit by shocks, the Fed said, “they tend to draw down their bank lines of credit at a faster rate than firms with only bank credit. This creates a channel through which PC funds may increase banks’ credit and liquidity risks, on balance.”