Inside Databricks: From 2013 to Now Into a $3.5 billion business
Startup Type:
Headquarter: San Francisco, USA
Current Status: Active (private; multi-billion-dollar valuation)
Founders: Ali Ghodsi, Matei Zaharia, Ion Stoica
Founded Year: 2013
Investors: Andreessen Horowitz, NEA, Microsoft
Funding Raised: $3.5 billion
What Is the business model of Databricks?
Enterprise software company that develops a unified analytics platform based on Apache Spark, offering cloud-based big data processing and AI/machine learning tools (primarily via subscriptions to its platform)
How Databricks got started?
Originated from the creators of Apache Spark at UC Berkeley, Databricks was founded to commercialize Spark by providing it as an easy-to-use cloud service for companies starting in 2013
what growth strategy has Databricks followed?
Leveraged the popularity of the open-source Spark engine, building a community and offering a managed platform that integrated data engineering, data science, and AI — an approach that attracted major enterprise customers and strategic investment from cloud providers
what are the top products/features of Databricks
Databricks Lakehouse Platform, MLflow, Delta Lake
what was the biggest challenge faced by Databricks?
Competing in the crowded data analytics and cloud AI space against both startups and cloud giants while needing to keep its platform cloud-agnostic and appealing to data scientists and IT alike