Wipro Founder Azim Premji’s Investment Arm Bets on Databricks in $5 Bn Funding Round

Wipro founder Azim Premji's investment arm has invested in Databricks as part of the company’s $5 billion strategic funding round at a $190 billion valuation, joining a group of major global investors backing the data and AI company.

In a detailed investment thesis, Premji Invest said Databricks sits at the centre of what it considers the biggest architectural shift in enterprise software since cloud computing.

"We see agentic workloads reaccelerate the core lakehouse business. Lakebase gives agents an operational backend they can provision. Genie makes governed enterprise data accessible to people who will never write SQL. And increasingly, an entirely new class of applications is being built directly on the platform. Very few companies successfully navigate more than one technology wave," Sandesh Patnam, Premji Invest Managing Partner, said.

Premji Invest's thesis is that Databricks is evolving beyond its traditional role as a data and analytics platform to become the execution and governed-context layer for enterprise AI agents.

Premji Invest, founded by Wipro founder Azim Premji, is a global investment firm backing companies across technology, healthcare, consumer, financial services and industrials. The firm says it has $15+ billion in evergreen capital, 165+ total investments, and a portfolio generating more than $20 billion in aggregate revenue, with 12+ IPOs and 7 M&A events.

The investment comes as Databricks reports rapid growth. The company said it has crossed a $7 billion revenue run rate, growing more than 80% year over year. Its Lakehouse business has surpassed a $1.5 billion revenue run rate, while Lakebase has crossed $100 million.

Premji Invest argues that the traditional enterprise data stack was designed around human behaviour, while AI agents could generate dramatically different workloads—issuing large numbers of queries, creating databases on demand and running continuously.

That makes governed enterprise context increasingly important, according to the investor. Databricks is building that infrastructure through products including Lakebase, its serverless Postgres database; Genie, which provides business context and answers from enterprise data; and Unity AI Gateway, which manages AI access, spending and governance across models, agents and tools.

"Databricks is uniquely positioned across the AI stack. Agentic demand is reaccelerating the core Lakehouse, which is emerging as an operational backend for agents, Unity Catalog is becoming the unified governance/context layer, Genie is expanding access beyond technical users, and new apps are being built directly on the platform," Akshay Kini, Premji Invest Deal Lead, said.

Premji Invest also sees Lakebase as a potentially important growth engine as AI agents generate more software applications and transactional workloads.

The investment firm said roughly 80% of databases on the Lakebase architecture are already being created by agents rather than humans, highlighting the shift it expects in enterprise software development.

For Premji Invest, the attraction is that Databricks does not need to predict which AI model or agent framework ultimately wins. As agent activity increases, the firm expects demand to flow through the underlying data, compute, governance and analytics infrastructure.

“The tremendous investor demand for this round shows that our AI strategy is winning the market and building what every business needs to maximise their impact with agents,” said Ali Ghodsi, Databricks Co-founder and CEO.