Databricks
Unified Data & AI Platform
- Valuation
- $190B(Aug 2026)
- Total Funding
- $14B+
- Revenue
- Revenue run-rate above $7B with >80% YoY growth (Q2 FY2026)
- Profit Status
- Pre-profit;gross margins >70%; IPO expected
- Revenue Growth
- 50%+ YoY
- Employees
- ~6,000
About Databricks
Databricks is the leading unified data analytics and AI platform, combining big data processing (based on Apache Spark) with machine learning, LLM fine-tuning, and governance. Founded by the creators of Apache Spark, Delta Lake, and MLflow, Databricks serves 10,000+ enterprises worldwide. Their open-source DBRX (March 2024) set a new benchmark for open-weight MoE models at launch. At a $62B valuation (Dec 2024), Databricks is one of the most valuable private software companies in the world.
Company History
Founded in 2013 by the creators of Apache Spark at UC Berkeley's AMPLab. Databricks commercialised Spark and became the go-to platform for big data analytics at enterprise scale. Invented Delta Lake (2019) and the Lakehouse architecture (unifying data lakes and data warehouses). MLflow (2018) became the industry standard for ML experiment tracking — donated to Linux Foundation. With the LLM boom, Databricks pivoted to AI with Mosaic AI (acquired MosaicML for $1.3B in 2023), enabling enterprises to fine-tune and serve LLMs on their own data. DBRX (March 2024), a 132B MoE model released under Apache 2.0, outperformed Mixtral 8x7B and GPT-3.5 on major benchmarks at release. IPO widely expected in 2025-2026.
AI Models & Benchmarks
2 modelsDBRX
Databricks' open-source MoE flagship model. Outperformed Mixtral 8x7B and GPT-3.5 at launch. Apache 2.0 license.
Benchmarks
- MMLU
- 73.7%
- HumanEval
- 70.1%
- GSM8K
- 72.8%
Dolly 2.0
First truly open, instruction-following LLM for commercial use. Based on EleutherAI Pythia.
Company Timeline
7 milestones- 2013Founded by Apache Spark creators from UC Berkeley AMPLab
- 2016Apache Spark donated to Apache Foundation; Databricks focuses on commercial platform
- 2018MLflow open-sourced — becomes industry standard for ML experiment tracking
- 2019Delta Lake open-sourced — reliable data lake transactions (ACID on Parquet)
- Jun 2023Acquired MosaicML for $1.3B — LLM training and Mosaic AI platform
- Mar 2024DBRX released as open-source 132B MoE model under Apache 2.0
- Dec 2024$10B raise at $62B valuation — one of the largest private software funding rounds ever
Funding Rounds
3 rounds| Date | Round | Amount | Investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Feb 2021 | Series G | $1B | Franklin Templeton, $28B valuation |
| Aug 2023 | Series I | $500M | Various, $43B valuation |
| Dec 2024 | Series J | $10B | Andreessen Horowitz, GreenOaks, ICONIQ, $62B valuation |
Products & Services
8- Databricks Lakehouse
- Mosaic AI (model serving & fine-tuning)
- MLflow (open-source)
- Unity Catalog
- Delta Lake (open-source)
- DBRX (open-source LLM)
- Databricks SQL
- Delta Sharing
People & ecosystem
Key People
- Ali Ghodsi (CEO / Co-founder)
- Reynold Xin (Co-founder)
- Matei Zaharia (Co-founder, creator of Apache Spark)
Key Investors
- Andreessen Horowitz
- GreenOaks Capital
- Tiger Global
- T. Rowe Price
- Microsoft
- Amazon
Competitive Landscape
- Snowflake
- Google BigQuery / Vertex AI
- Microsoft Fabric / Azure ML
- AWS SageMaker