Databricks was founded in 2013 by the original creators of Apache Spark at UC Berkeley, including Ali Ghodsi, Matei Zaharia, and five others. Headquartered in San Francisco, the company has raised over $4 billion in funding and reached a valuation of $62 billion in its December 2024 funding round — making it one of the most valuable private tech companies in the world.
The company’s Lakehouse Platform combines the best features of data warehouses and data lakes into a single architecture. It lets organizations store, process, and analyze massive amounts of data while also building and deploying machine learning models. The platform runs on all major cloud providers and supports SQL analytics, data engineering, data science, and real-time streaming.
Databricks has over 10,000 customers, including Shell, HSBC, Regeneron, and many Fortune 500 companies. Revenue has grown rapidly, exceeding $2 billion in annual run rate. The company has also made significant investments in open source, contributing Delta Lake, MLflow, and Unity Catalog to the community.
With the rise of generative AI, Databricks launched MosaicML (acquired in 2023 for $1.3 billion) to offer model training capabilities, and introduced DBRX, their own open-source LLM. They’ve positioned their platform as the place where enterprises prepare data for AI, fine-tune models, and deploy AI applications. For data teams that need to bridge traditional analytics and modern AI, Databricks has become a central player.
