#databricks

#databricks

US startup funding declined 15.4% in December to close out 2025, with $15.4B deployed across 521 deals. While down from November's elevated levels, December maintained healthy deal flow across all stages, led by Databricks' $4B mega-round. AI companies continued to dominate, capturing 67.6% of total funding. The US venture capital market closed 2025 with measured activity in December, as funding declined 15.4% from November's $18.2B to $15.4B across 521 deals.

Snowflake offers a fully managed data platform, but Sumo Logic users often lack insight into performance, login activity, and operational health. The Sumo Logic Snowflake Logs App analyzes login and access activity to identify anomalies or suspicious behavior. It also optimizes data pipelines with insights into long-running or failing queries. Teams can centralize log data to facilitate correlation across applications, cloud services, and data platforms.

Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi thinks the AI boom (and bubble) are creating pockets of relentless sameness across tech. "I'm a little bit worried," he said. "There's definitely too much of everybody doing the same thing in general...It's kind of like watching kids play soccer-all of them run towards the same ball. Then, there's a big collision in the middle, somebody kicks the ball somewhere else-and then all of them run that way."

Databricks and Snowflake are at it again, and the battleground is now SQL-based document parsing. In an intensifying race to dominate enterprise AI workloads with agent-driven automation, Databricks has added SQL-based AI parsing capabilities to its Agent Bricks framework, just days after Snowflake introduced a similar ability inside its Intelligence platform. The new abilities from Snowflake and Databricks are designed to help enterprises analyze unstructured data, preferably using agent-automated SQL, backed by their individual existing technologies, such as Cortex AISQL and Databricks' AI Functions.

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.

Databricks is contributing the technology behind Delta Live Tables (DLT) to the Apache Spark project as Spark Declarative Pipelines, simplifying the development of streaming pipelines.

Lakeflow and OpenFlow reflect two philosophies: Databricks integrates data engineering into a Spark-native, open orchestration fabric, while Snowflake's OpenFlow offers declarative workflow control.