Databricks – Startup Story | Founder| CEO | Funding | History | Competitors

Introduction:

ABN AMRO, Condé Nast, Regeneron, and Shell are just a few of the over 7,000 companies that depend on Databricks today to provide massive-scale data engineering, collaborative data science, full-lifecycle machine learning, and business analytics.

Databricks is a cloud data platform that tries to address the issue of the growing demand for a single system to store data as businesses have begun to gather significant amounts of data from several sources. A distinct architecture strategy is required to make images, audio, and other unstructured data freely accessible for training ML models.

About Databricks:

The developers of Apache Spark formed the American enterprise software startup Databricks. Databricks creates a web-based platform for using Spark that includes IPython-style notebooks and automatic cluster administration.

As businesses prepare for a recession, the CEO reports that demand for AI-ready data is on the rise. Databricks Inc. reports that its annualized revenue has surpassed $1 billion. This achievement comes as the nine-year-old data analytics business wants to acquire other digital businesses to spur expansion.

It has plans to hire 2,500 new workers this year, which will serve as a significant counterweight to the constant stream of layoffs at digital startups that we have been reading about for the majority of this year. On the other side, Databricks began 2022 with 3,000 workers, has since grown to over 4,000, and anticipates reaching 5,500 by the end of the year.

Databricks Founder & Team:

The original developers of MLflow, Delta Lake, and Apache Spark launched Databricks in 2013. Databricks combines the best of data warehouses and data lakes to provide an open and unified platform for data and AI as the first and only lakehouse platform in the cloud.

San Francisco serves as the company’s main office. Additionally, it conducts business in Brazil, India, Japan, China, South Korea, Australia, Singapore, the Netherlands, Canada, the United Kingdom, and France.

Databricks History:

The University of California, Berkeley’s AMPLab project, which contributed to the creation of Apache Spark, an open-source distributed computing platform built on Scala, is where Databricks originated. Ali Ghodsi, Andy Konwinski, Arsalan Tavakoli-Shiraji, Ion Stoica, Matei Zaharia, Patrick Wendell, and Reynold Xin were the founders of the business.

Through the integration of Azure Databricks, the business was announced as a first-party service on Microsoft Azure in November 2017. To improve data lakes for machine learning and other data science use cases, the business creates the open-source project Delta Lake.

Redash, an open-source platform created to assist data scientists and analysts in visualizing and creating interactive dashboards of their data, was bought by Databricks in June 2020. Databricks offered a connection with the Google BigQuery platform and the Google Kubernetes Engine in February 2021 in conjunction with Google Cloud. Databricks was named one of the top large “Workplaces for Millennials” by Fortune in 2021. The business claimed more than 5,000 companies were using its goods at the time.

Databricks completed its eighth round of investment in August 2021 with a $1.6 billion raise, valuing the company at $38 billion. German no-code business 8080 Labs was acquired by Databricks for the second time in October 2021. Bamboolib, a tool for data exploration that doesn’t require coding, is produced by 8080 Labs.

Databricks Name & Logo:

Databricks Highlight:

Databricks Revenue:

More than 7,000 companies, including Comcast, John Deere, and Walgreens, use Databricks and its data “lakehouse” strategy to construct analytics and machine learning capabilities. Databricks was last valued by private investors at $38 billion.

Databricks Funding & Investors:

When Databricks announced in September 2013 that the company had raised $13.9 million from Andreessen Horowitz, it stated that its goal was to provide an alternative to Google’s MapReduce system. In 2019, Microsoft was a well-known investor in Databricks, contributing an undisclosed sum to the company’s Series E.

At a $28 billion post-money valuation in February 2021, the business raised $1.9 billion in capital, including a $1 billion Series G sponsored by Franklin Templeton. Amazon Web Services, CapitalG (a growth equity company owned by Alphabet, Inc.), and Salesforce Ventures are some additional investors.

Databricks Business Model:

Through subscriptions to its Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions, Databricks generates revenue. The business measures processing capacity per hour using “Databricks Units,” or DBUs, and charges users based on usage rather than a fixed fee.

Services Offered thru Databricks:

The marketing phrase “lakehouse,” a combination of the terms “data warehouse” and “data lake,” is used by Databricks to develop and advertise a cloud data platform. Based on the open-source Apache Spark technology, Databricks’ lakehouse enables analytical queries against semi-structured data without the need for a conventional database schema. Lakehouse was granted FedRAMP authorization in October 2022 for usage with contractors and the U.S. federal government.

In order to improve query performance, Databricks’ Delta Engine, a new query engine, was introduced in June 2020. It layers on top of Delta Lake. It is compatible with the Databricks open-source projects MLflow and Apache Spark.

For BI and analytics reporting on top of data lakes, Databricks announced Databricks SQL (formerly known as SQL Analytics) in November 2020. Analysts can use product connectors to interface directly with business intelligence products like Tableau, Qlik, Looker, and ThoughtSpot or directly query data sets using conventional SQL.

A platform for different workloads is provided by Databricks, including machine learning, data processing, streaming analytics, and business intelligence. Additionally, the business has developed the open-source projects Delta Lake, MLflow, and Koalas, which cover data engineering, data science, and machine learning. In addition to developing the Databricks platform, the firm also has co-organized conferences for the Spark community called the Data + AI Summit (formerly known as Spark Summit) and massive open online courses (MOOCs) about Spark.

Databricks Awards & Recognition:

• Award for Customer Favorite Cloud Database Management Systems in 2022.
• Leader in the Cloud Database Management Magic Quadrant for 2021.

Databricks Competitors:

The top alternatives and rivals to Databricks Lakehouse Platform include Qubole, Snowflake, Dremio, Google Cloud BigQuery, and others.

Databricks Latest News:

Added a brand new persona-based navigation to Databricks.

Databricks Future Plans:

The data and AI business data bricks announced the development of its international operations to meet the needs of the Italian market. Databricks sees a huge opportunity to expand into one of the region’s fastest-growing nations, with plans to hire a growing local team of technical specialists, data specialists, sales engineers, and partner managers. A third of its SEMEA business is represented in Italian customers like Barilla and illimitably.

FAQs about Databricks:

Is Databricks better than Spark?

Although it has several characteristics that make it a superior choice to Spark, Databricks is made to make data processing faster and simpler than ever before. Users of Databricks have access to a single platform where they can process data, make reports, and keep track of performance.

How fast is Databricks growing?

It has plans to hire 2,500 new workers this year, which will serve as a significant counterweight to the constant stream of layoffs at digital startups that we have been reading about for the majority of this year. On the other side, Databricks began 2022 with 3,000 workers, has since grown to over 4,000, and anticipates reaching 5,500 by the end of the year.

Is Databricks making money?

As businesses prepare for a recession, the CEO reports that demand for AI-ready data is on the rise. Databricks Inc. claims that its annualized sales have surpassed $1 billion.

Is Databricks a good investment?

Databricks passed $425 million in annual recurring revenue in 2020, an increase of more than 75% year over year (YOY). Additionally, recurring revenue increased even higher in 2021, reaching $800 million.

Is Databricks owned by Microsoft?

Microsoft has just become a shareholder in Databricks. Microsoft took part in a fresh $250 million fundraising round for Databricks, which was established by the U.C. Berkeley team that created the well-known open-source Apache Spark data-processing platform.

Can I use Databricks without Spark?

You must have a cluster, but it’s perfectly possible to run code that doesn’t use Spark at all.

What can Databricks be used for?

Databricks is used for building, testing, and deploying machine learning and analytics applications to help achieve better business outcomes.

Can we use Databricks without the cloud?

Databricks workspaces can be hosted on Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, and you can use Databricks on any hosting platform to access data wherever you keep it, regardless of cloud.

What do I need to know about Databricks?

Databricks is a cloud-based analyzing tool that can be used for analyzing and processing massive amounts of big data. Databricks is a product of Microsoft cloud that used Apache Spark for computation purposes.

Which database is used in Databricks?

As Delta Lake is the default storage provider for tables created in Databricks, all tables created in Databricks are Delta tables, by default.

Conclusion:

In SEMEA and the entire EMEA region, the company is growing by more than 100% YoY. The company has regional offices in France and a developing presence there, in addition to its intentions for growth in Italy. The Lakehouse, developed by Databricks, is a straightforward and open architecture for data and AI that provides the dependability, governance, and performance of a data warehouse right to the data lakes where businesses currently store their data.

Sai Sandhya

My name is Sai Sandhya, and I work as a senior SEO strategist for the content writing team. I enjoy creating case studies, articles on startups, and listicles.