Jan 22 (Reuters) - Databricks said on Wednesday Meta

Platforms had joined as an investor in a $10 billion

funding round intended to fuel the data analytics startup's

expansion plans and new product development.

The Series J funding round closed on Wednesday and

valued Databricks at $62 billion.

The company also secured a $5.25 billion credit facility led

by JPMorgan Chase alongside Barclays, Citi, Goldman Sachs, and

Morgan Stanley.

Founded in 2013, San Francisco-based Databricks offers a

platform designed to help users ingest, analyze and build

artificial intelligence applications using complex data from a

variety of sources.

Investors are racing to pour money into AI-related startups

after the meteoric success of OpenAI's ChatGPT triggered a surge

in corporate adoption of the technology.

Sam Altman-led OpenAI raised $6.6 billion from investors in

2024.

Companies, including Meta, have been investing heavily to

build and train large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT,

which are advanced AI systems designed to understand and

generate human-like text.

Databricks works closely with Meta's Llama team. Llama is a

family of open-source LLMs developed by the Facebook parent.

"Thousands of customers are using Llama on Databricks and we

have been working closely with Meta on how to best serve those

enterprise customers with Llama," Databricks co-founder and CEO

Ali Ghodsi said.

"It naturally made sense for both parties to deepen that

partnership through this investment."

More than 10,000 organizations, including Comcast, Block,

Rivian and Shell, rely on the company's Databricks Data

Intelligence Platform to manage and analyze data for AI

applications, according to its website.