Tech
Databricks CEO says SaaS isn’t dead, but AI will soon make it irrelevant
On Monday, Databricks announced it reached a $5.4 billion revenue run rate, growing 65% year-over-year, of which more than $1.4 billion was from its AI products.
Co-founder and CEO Ali Ghodsi wanted to share these growth numbers because there’s so much talk about how AI is going to kill the SaaS business, he told TechCrunch.
“Everybody’s like, ‘Oh, it’s SaaS. What’s going to happen to all these companies? What’s AI going to do with all these companies?’ For us, it’s just increasing the usage,” he said.
To be sure, he also wants to distance Databricks from the SaaS label, given that private markets value it as an AI company. Databricks on Monday also officially closed on its massive, previously announced $5 billion raise at a $134 billion valuation, and nabbed a $2 billion loan facility as well.
But the company is straddling both worlds. Databricks is still best known as a cloud data warehouse provider. A data warehouse is where enterprises store massive amounts of data to analyze for business insights.
Ghodsi called out, in particular, one AI product that’s driving usage of its data warehouse: its LLM user interface named Genie.
Genie is an example of how a SaaS business can replace its user interface with natural language. For instance, he uses it to ask why warehouse usage and revenue spike on particular days.
Just a few years ago, such a request required writing queries in a specific technical language, or having a special report programmed. Today, any product with an LLM interface can be used by anyone, Ghodsi noted. Genie is one reason for the company’s usage growth numbers, he said.
The threat of AI to SaaS isn’t, as one AI VC jokingly tweeted, that enterprises will rip out their SaaS “systems of record” to replace them with vibe-coded homegrown versions. Systems of record store critical business data, whether it’s on sales, customer support, or finance.
“Why would you move your system of record? You know, it’s hard to move it,” Ghodsi said.
The model makers aren’t offering databases to store that data and become systems of record anyway. Instead, they hope to replace the user interface with natural language for human use, or APIs or other plug-ins for AI agents.
So the threat to SaaS businesses, Ghodsi says, is that people no longer spend their careers becoming masters of a particular product: Salesforce specialists, or ServiceNow, or SAP. Once the interface is just language, the products become invisible, like plumbing.
“Millions of people around the world got trained on those user interfaces. And so that was the biggest moat that those businesses have,” Ghodsi warned.
SaaS companies that embrace the new LLM interface could grow, as Databricks is doing. But it also opens up possibilities for AI-native competitors to offer alternatives that work better with AI and agents.
That’s why Databricks created its Lakebase database designed for agents. He’s seeing early traction. “In its eight months that we’ve had it in the market, it’s done twice as much revenue as our data warehouse had when it was eight months old. Okay, obviously, that’s like comparing toddlers,” Ghodsi says. “But this is a toddler that’s twice as big.”
Meanwhile, now that Databricks has closed on its massive funding round, Ghodsi tells us that the company is not immediately working on another raise, nor prepping for an IPO.
“Now is not a great time to go public,” Ghodsi said. “I just wanted to be really well capitalized” should the markets go “south” again as they did in the 2022 downturn, when interest rates rose sharply after years of near-zero rates. A thick bank account “protects us, gives us many, many years of runway,” he added.
Tech
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Tech
Uber to buy delivery arm of Turkey’s Getir
Uber has agreed to acquire the delivery business of Turkey’s Getir, once one of the biggest success stories of the country’s startup ecosystem, the company announced on Monday.
The deal will see Uber paying $335 million at the outset to purchase Getir’s food delivery business. The ride-hailing giant will also pay $100 million for a 15% stake in Getir’s grocery, retail, and water delivery business, and said it would complete the acquisition of the division over the next few years.
Uber is buying the business from Getir’s biggest shareholder, the Emirati sovereign wealth fund Mubadala. The investment firm was reportedly seeking to sell its stake in the company last year.
The deal comes after a turbulent few years for Getir, which once enjoyed a valuation of $12 billion, that saw the startup scale down its operations massively. The company launched to great traction in 2015, and invested aggressively to expand its operations in the U.S. and Europe, both organically and via acquisitions, especially during the pandemic.
But after the pandemic lockdowns eased, broader consumer demand for food and grocery delivery also wavered, and Getir chose to cut its losses in 2024, shutting shop and laying off thousands of staff in the U.S., U.K., and Europe in order to focus on business back home.
Nearly a year ago, the company went through a struggle for control over a restructuring plan proposed by Mubadala. The plan was opposed by one of Getir’s co-founders, who eventually sued to fight the “illegal coup,” but a Dutch court rejected the founder’s appeals.
The company has raised a total of $2.40 billion so far, according to PitchBook. Documents filed by Getir in court last year show the company valued its group assets at $374 million.
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“This transaction reflects the strength of the business and the progress it has made, particularly over the last year,” Waleed Al Mokarrab Al Muhairi, deputy group CEO at Mubadala, said in a statement.
Uber said it would combine the new unit’s services with Trendyol Go, a food and grocery delivery service in Turkey that the ride-hail giant bought for $700 million last May. Uber said Getir’s food delivery business alone recorded gross bookings of more than $1 billion in 2025, up 50% from a year earlier.
The deal follows a strong showing by Uber’s delivery business in the fourth quarter, reporting revenue of $4.89 billion, up 30% from a year earlier. The company said Europe, the Middle East, and Asia proved the fastest-growing regions for the business in 2026.
Tech
Discord to roll out age verification next month for full access to its platform
Discord is rolling out age verification globally starting next month, the company announced on Monday. All users will be put into a “teen-appropriate experience” by default unless they prove they’re adults. Age verification will be required to change certain settings and access age-restricted content.
Discord users will need to be confirmed as adults in order to unblur sensitive content or turn off the setting, and only adults can access age-restricted channels, servers, and app commands. Additionally, messages from people a user may not know are routed to a separate inbox by default, and only verified adults can modify this setting.
People will receive warning prompts for friend requests from users they may not know, and only adults will be able speak onstage in servers.
To complete age verification, users need to either complete a facial age estimation or submit an ID to Discord’s vendor partners. The platform plans to add more options in the future. Discord notes that some users may be asked to use multiple methods when additional information is needed to assign an age group.
The facial age estimation requires video selfies, which Discord says never leave your device. Additionally, the company says IDs submitted to its vendor partners are deleted quickly and, in most cases, immediately after age confirmation.
It’s worth noting that Discord disclosed last October that around 70,000 users may have had sensitive data, such as their government ID photos, exposed after hackers breached a third-party vendor that the platform uses for age-related appeals. The breach reflected digital rights activists’ concerns over the use of age checks as a way to make the internet “safer.”
Discord’s global launch of age verification follows the company’s decision to establish age checks for users in the U.K. and Australia last year.
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“Rolling out teen-by-default settings globally builds on Discord’s existing safety architecture, giving teens strong protections while allowing verified adults flexibility,” said Savannah Badalich, head of product policy at Discord, in a press release. “We design our products with teen safety principles at the core and will continue working with safety experts, policymakers, and Discord users to support meaningful, long term wellbeing for teens on the platform.”
The announcement mirrors similar moves made by other online platforms, reflecting growing international efforts to strengthen child safety. Most recently, Roblox introduced mandatory facial verification for access to chats on its platform. Last July, YouTube launched its age-estimation technology in the U.S. to identify teen users in order to provide a more age-appropriate experience.
Discord’s age-verification changes will begin in early March, and both new and existing users will need to verify their age to access age-restricted content.
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