Artificial Intelligence · Profile from AI Research Companion
Databricks
The San Francisco data and AI platform founded in 2013 by the University of California, Berkeley researchers who created Apache Spark. It sells the "lakehouse", a design that keeps enterprise data in cheap cloud object storage in open formats (Delta Lake, and since its 2024 purchase of Tabular, Apache Iceberg) and runs data engineering, SQL warehousing, machine learning and now AI agents on top of it, charging by consumption. Between 2023 and 2026 it made the largest bet of any data company on generative AI: it bought MosaicML (~$1.3bn, June 2023), trained and released its own open model, DBRX (March 2024), then largely stopped competing on models and pivoted to hosting other labs' models (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta) next to customers' governed data. It bought Tabular (reported ~$2bn; WSJ $1–2bn at announcement, June 2024) and Neon (~$1bn, May 2025) and became the most valuable private software company outside the frontier labs: $62bn (December 2024), >$100bn (August–September 2025), $134bn (December 2025–February 2026) and ~$190bn (August 2026, reported). By its own account it passed a $7bn revenue run-rate in mid-2026, growing above 80% (company claim, unaudited). It is still private; its CEO called 2026 a poor year to list.
At a glance
- Founded
- 2013 in Berkeley/San Francisco by seven creators of Apache Spark from Berkeley's AMPLab: Ali Ghodsi, Matei Zaharia, Ion Stoica, Reynold Xin, Patrick Wendell, Andy Konwinski and Arsalan Tavakoli-Shiraji
- Headquarters
- San Francisco, California
- Ownership / structure
- Private. Investors include Andreessen Horowitz (Series A, 2013), NEA, Microsoft (2019), Counterpoint Global, Franklin Templeton, T. Rowe Price, Thrive Capital, Insight Partners, Fidelity, J.P. Morgan Asset Management, MGX, Coatue, Blackstone and others (company and reported). Regular employee tender offers rather than a listing
- Leadership (2026)
- Ali Ghodsi (co-founder, CEO since January 2016); Matei Zaharia (co-founder, CTO); Ion Stoica (co-founder, executive chairman); Reynold Xin (co-founder, chief architect); Naveen Rao led AI after the MosaicML deal until leaving in September 2025 (reported)
- Products
- Data Intelligence Platform: Delta Lake and Iceberg storage, Unity Catalog (governance, open-sourced June 2024), Databricks SQL (warehousing), Lakeflow (ingestion and pipelines), MLflow, Mosaic AI (model serving, fine-tuning, vector search, evaluation), Agent Bricks (agents, June 2025), Lakebase (serverless Postgres from Neon, 2025), Databricks Apps, AI/BI Genie, Delta Sharing and Marketplace
- Scale
- Revenue run-rate >$4.8bn (Q3 FY2026, October 2025), >$5.4bn (February 2026), >$7bn (mid-2026, growth >80%); >1,000 customers spending at a >$1m run-rate and >100 at >$10m (August 2026); net retention >140% (December 2025); free-cash-flow positive over the trailing twelve months (all company claims, reported)
- Market value
- ~$190bn post-money in a ~$5bn round led by Coatue (August 2026, reported); secondary-market marks ~$200bn (October 2026, aggregator estimates, verify)
- Signature moves (incl. failures)
- Spark and the AMPLab spin-out (2013); Delta Lake and the lakehouse (2019–21); MosaicML (2023); DBRX and its fade (2024); Tabular and the Iceberg format war (2024); the copyright suit over MPT training (2024–26); the funding run from $62bn to ~$190bn and the IPO delay (2024–26); Neon and Lakebase (2025); Anthropic and OpenAI partnerships and Agent Bricks (2025)
8 strategic moves analysed
Each one gets a full strategy file in the companion: context, the decision, the financing, what happened, and the lesson.
2013
Spark and the AMPLab Spin Out
Founding
2019
Delta Lake and the Lakehouse
Launch / positioning
2023
MosaicML Acquisition
Acquisition (and the lawsuit that followed)
2024
DBRX and the Open Model Fade
Model release (failure to sustain)
2024
Series J to 190bn and the IPO Delay
Funding round (series of rounds)
2024
Tabular and the Iceberg Format War
Acquisition
2025
Anthropic OpenAI Partnerships and Agent Bricks
Partnership / launch
2025
Neon Lakebase and the Agent Database
Acquisition / launch