Databricks finds itself in an awkward situation following the departure of Naveen Rao, its head of artificial intelligence, as rivals like Snowflake, Teradata, and hyperscalers such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, intensify their push to develop offerings for building generative AI applications. Rao's exit comes at a time when Databricks is aggressively trying to expand its offerings inside the Data Intelligence Platform, mainly with Lakebase and Agent Bricks, thanks to the infusion of capital from this week's $1 billion Series K funding round.
Crowdstrike, a Texas-based cybersecurity company, has agreed to lease roughly 150,000 square feet of space in downtown Sunnyvale, according to several sources with knowledge of the transaction. The sources were not authorized to speak about the deal publicly. This transaction represents a fresh, big win for downtown Sunnyvale and Cityline, a mixed-use neighborhood that has produced housing, shops, restaurants, workspaces and now jobs in the city's urban core.
"Every company can securely turn its enterprise data into AI apps and agents to grow revenue faster, operate more efficiently, and make smarter decisions with less risk," Ghodsi said.