Databricks
FeaturedThe data and AI company.
Founded in 2013 by Ali Ghodsi and six fellow UC Berkeley PhD students, Databricks was built on top of Apache Spark, an open-source big data processing engine they invented at Berkeley. The company pioneered the data lakehouse architecture, combining the best of data warehouses and data lakes into a single platform. In 2025, Databricks raised $15 billion at a $134 billion valuation, making it one of the most valuable private companies in the world. The company serves over 10,000 customers including Block, Comcast, and Regeneron. Its 2023 acquisition of MosaicML for $1.3 billion accelerated its move into generative AI model training and deployment.
Active Founders
Ali Ghodsi
Founder / CEO
Ali Ghodsi is the co-founder and CEO of Databricks. Born in Iran and raised in Sweden, he completed his PhD in computer science at UC Berkeley where he co-created Apache Spark. Ali leads one of the most valuable private companies in Silicon Valley and is known for his vision of making data and AI accessible to every enterprise. He has championed the open-source approach to AI development through Databricks' release of the DBRX and Dolly language models.
Matei Zaharia
Co-Founder / CTO
Matei Zaharia is the co-founder and CTO of Databricks and the original creator of Apache Spark. He completed his PhD at UC Berkeley under Scott Shenker and Ion Stoica. Matei's work on Spark, which became the most widely used big data processing engine in the world, laid the technical foundation for Databricks. He is also an associate professor at Stanford University and continues to be one of the most influential researchers in distributed systems and AI infrastructure.
Databricks
