Databricks

Databricks is an American data and artificial intelligence company headquartered in San Francisco, founded in 2013 by seven PhD students from the AMPLab at the University of California, Berkeley, and led by co-founder and CEO Ali Ghodsi. The company commercialised the open-source big data framework Apache Spark and pioneered the lakehouse architecture, which combines data warehouse and data lake capabilities on open formats, and it is one of the most valuable private software companies in the world.^[1][2]

History and Funding

Databricks was founded in 2013 by researchers from UC Berkeley's AMPLab to commercialise Apache Spark, and launched its cloud platform in 2014.^[2] In June 2023, the company agreed to acquire MosaicML, a startup building platforms for training and deploying open-source large language models, for US$1.3 billion, later rebranding it as Mosaic AI.^[3][4] In March 2024, Databricks released DBRX, an open-source mixture-of-experts large language model with 132 billion total parameters trained on 12 trillion tokens, which became one of the fastest open general-purpose models available.^[5][6]

The company's valuation grew rapidly through successive funding rounds: US$62 billion in December 2024 (Series J), above US$100 billion in August 2025 (Series K), and US$134 billion in December 2025, when it announced a US$4 billion Series L round led by Insight Partners, Fidelity, and J.P. Morgan Asset Management; total financing associated with that round exceeded US$7 billion by February 2026.^[1][7] In September 2025, Databricks committed US$100 million to OpenAI, and it maintains a five-year strategic partnership with Anthropic.^[2][1] In July 2026, the company signed a term sheet for a US$3 billion round led by Coatue Management at a US$188 billion valuation,^[2][7] and in August 2026 it closed a US$5 billion round at a US$190 billion valuation, reporting that it had crossed a US$7 billion revenue run-rate with more than 80 percent year-over-year growth.^[8][9] Databricks serves more than 20,000 customers, including over 700 large enterprises spending at least US$1 million annually.^[1]

Technology

The Databricks Lakehouse Platform unifies data engineering, warehousing, and machine learning on open data formats such as Delta Lake, with Unity Catalog providing governance across data and AI assets.^[1] The company is a major contributor to open-source MLOps tooling, including MLflow and the data-sharing formats it helped standardise. Unlike cloud providers that bundle AI with their own infrastructure, Databricks positions itself as a model-agnostic platform on which customers can run frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and others over their own enterprise data.^[1] In 2026 the company directed new funding toward three AI products: Lakebase, a serverless database built for AI agents; Genie, an AI assistant that answers questions from business data; and Unity AI Gateway, a platform for managing multi-model use and cost control.^[8][9]

Impact

Databricks is regarded as one of the main beneficiaries of enterprise AI adoption, competing with cloud-native data platforms such as Snowflake and with the data services of AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.^[2][7] CEO Ali Ghodsi has said the company is "ready to IPO", with a potential public listing expected when market conditions are favourable.^[1]

>See Also

• MLflow
• Large Language Models
• Mixture of Experts
• Data Pipeline
• OpenAI

References