Databricks
Data lakehouse platform that grew 55% to $4.8B revenue by unifying data infrastructure like mycelium connects forest resources.
Databricks hit $134 billion valuation in December 2025 by solving a problem most companies don't know they have: their data infrastructure is fragmented across warehouses, lakes, and AI platforms that don't talk to each other. The company crossed $4.8 billion revenue run-rate growing 55% year-over-year, with over $1 billion each from data warehousing and AI products. This is ecosystem engineering - building substrate that other organisms depend on.
The mycelium parallel is precise. In forests, mycorrhizal networks connect trees of different species, moving nutrients from surplus to deficit areas. Databricks connects disparate data sources - Snowflake warehouses, S3 lakes, machine learning pipelines - into unified infrastructure. Companies running Databricks report 140% net dollar retention, meaning existing customers expand usage 40% annually. That's not product stickiness; that's becoming embedded infrastructure. Over 60% of Fortune 500 depend on Databricks, including Mastercard, Unilever, and Rivian.
Network effects compound through data gravity. Each dataset added to a lakehouse makes the platform more useful for analytics, which attracts more data teams, which builds more pipelines. The company crossed 11,500 customers globally with average contract value over $200,000. Databricks' partnerships show the strategy: $100 million deals with both Anthropic and OpenAI to embed their LLMs, a four-year partnership with Google for Gemini integration. This isn't vendor lock-in; it's creating the connective tissue between AI and data.
The $1 billion acquisition of Neon database (18,000 customers including OpenAI and Adobe) and May 2025 launch of Lakebase Postgres database extend the mycelium deeper into infrastructure. Databricks isn't selling analytics software; it's becoming the substrate layer for enterprise AI. When 80% gross margins meet positive free cash flow at $4.8 billion scale, the pattern is clear: infrastructure that connects everything else captures compounding value. Mycelial networks don't compete with trees; they make forests possible.