Databricks is a U.S. data and artificial intelligence company that provides a cloud-based platform for processing, storing, and analyzing large datasets and building AI models. The company is headquartered in San Francisco and operates across North America, Europe, and Asia.
The company was founded in 2013 by Ali Ghodsi, Matei Zaharia, and five other researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, who had previously created Apache Spark — an open-source framework that allows organizations to process massive volumes of data at speed. Databricks was built to commercialize and extend that work, offering businesses a managed environment where data engineering, data science, and machine learning can be combined in one place.
The core product is the Databricks Lakehouse Platform, which merges two previously distinct approaches to data storage: the data warehouse, which structures data for analysis, and the data lake, which stores raw, unstructured data at scale. By combining both into a single "lakehouse" architecture, Databricks allows organizations to run analytics and train AI models on the same underlying data without moving it between separate systems. The platform runs on top of major public cloud providers, including Amazon $AMZN Web Services, Microsoft $MSFT Azure, and Google $GOOGL Cloud.
Databricks customers span financial services, healthcare, retail, and media, and include large enterprises that need to manage and extract value from data at scale. The company competes with cloud data warehouse providers such as Snowflake $SNOW, as well as with the data and AI services offered directly by cloud providers.
Databricks is privately held and is one of the most highly valued private technology companies in the world. It has raised multiple large funding rounds from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Tiger Global, and