As 2024 comes to a close, the lesson seems to be that it is never too late to raise more funding. This week, four companies announced they had closed their respective funding rounds right on time for Christmas. First, data, analytics, and AI company Databricks secured an impressive $10 billion Series J from notable investors including Thrive Capital and co-leads Andreessen Horowitz, DST Global, GIC, Insight Partners, and WCM Investment Management. In addition to sharing the news about its new funding, Databricks also shared that it expects to reach positive free cash flow and exceed $3 billion run-rate revenue by January 31, 2025, after reaching 60% growth year-over-year during Q3, 2024.

Then, three startups working on promising applications of generative AI announced their respective funding rounds. Decart, a relatively young startup that made enough money from AI infrastructure to pivot into developing 'open-world' models, closed its $32 million Series A led by Benchmark less than two months after raising $21 million in seed funding in a round led by Sequoia and Zeev Ventures. Decart gained notoriety after releasing a technical demo of Oasis AI, a model capable of generating "playable" Minecraft-like worlds. World models like Decart's are shaping to be the next frontier for generative AI in parallel with 'agentic' AI.