Databricks

Databricks, Inc. is an American data and artificial intelligence software company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It was founded in 2013 by the original creators of Apache Spark at the University of California, Berkeley. It offers a cloud-based platform for data analytics and artificial intelligence. It operates natively across Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. The platform includes an open data marketplace built on the Delta Sharing protocol, and functions as a managed AI infrastructure provider by providing proprietary foundation models—including those from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google Gemini—directly within its secure perimeter.

Databricks developed the 'data lakehouse' architecture, which combines elements of data warehouses and data lakes for managing structured and unstructured data. The company develops Delta Lake, an open-source project that adds ACID transaction support to data lakes.

Databricks' platform incorporates the company's core data and AI offerings, including the Lakebase database designed for AI agents, Lakeflow Designer for building data pipelines, and the Agent Bricks production-scale AI agent development workspace. The company recently announced Genie Code, an autonomous AI agent that assists with data engineering, data science and analytics tasks.

History

2013–2021

Databricks grew out of the AMPLab project at University of California, Berkeley, that was involved in making Apache Spark, an open-source distributed computing framework built atop Scala. The company was founded by Ali Ghodsi, Andy Konwinski, Arsalan Tavakoli-Shiraji, Ion Stoica, Matei Zaharia, Patrick Wendell, and Reynold Xin.

Microsoft Azure integrated Databricks as Azure Databricks in 2017.

In February 2021, together with Google Cloud, Databricks provided integration with the Google Kubernetes Engine and Google's BigQuery platform. In February 2021, the company reported having more than 5,000 customers.

2022–present

Databricks announced the Data Intelligence Platform, integrating its lakehouse architecture with generative AI capabilities acquired from MosaicML.

The firm was valued at $62 billion in December 2024, following a $10 billion funding round.

In early March 2025, Databricks announced it would invest $1 billion in San Francisco's downtown.

In June 2025, Databricks entered into a four-year partnership with Alphabet to incorporate Gemini into the Databricks platform. The company launched Agent Bricks, a suite of tools to help organizations build AI agents, and Lakebase, an OLTP database.

In April 2025, Databricks was featured in the Forbes AI 50 list.

In September 2025, Databricks entered into a partnership with OpenAI to incorporate the company's LLMs into the Databricks platform in a deal valued at $100 million.

In December 2025, Databricks raised more than $4 billion in a Series L funding round at a $134 billion valuation. This was Databricks' third major fundraise in less than a year. "It comes as the company focuses on building products that address the needs of the AI revolution: a database for AI agents, an AI agent platform, and apps that let companies build and deploy data and AI applications."

Acquisitions

In June 2020, Databricks bought Redash, an open-source tool for data visualization and building of interactive dashboards. In 2021, it bought German no-code company 8080 Labs whose product, bamboolib, allowed data exploration without any coding. In May 2023, Databricks bought data security group Okera, extending Databricks data governance capabilities. In June, it bought the open-source generative AI startup MosaicML for $1.4 billion. In October, Databricks bought data replication startup Arcion for $100 million. In 2024, Databricks bought data-management startup Tabular for over $1 billion.

In March 2023, in response to the popularity of OpenAI's ChatGPT, the company introduced an open-source language model, named Dolly after Dolly the sheep, that developers could use to create custom chatbots. Dolly has only 6 billion parameters. Databricks claimed that Dolly had "ChatGPT-like instruction following ability", but has not released formal benchmark tests comparing it to ChatGPT.

Databricks reported $1.6 billion in revenue for the 2023 fiscal year.

In 2025, Databricks acquired a serverless database startup, Neon, for around $1 billion. In June 2026, Databricks announced it had agreed to acquire Panther Labs, an AI security operations center (SOC) platform, in order to use Panther's technology to support development for the security lakehouse capabilities of Lakewatch.

Funding

In September 2013, Databricks announced it raised $13.9 million from Andreessen Horowitz and said it aimed to offer an alternative to Google's MapReduce system. Microsoft was a noted investor of Databricks in 2019, participating in the company's Series E at an unspecified amount. The company has raised $1.9 billion in funding, including a $1 billion Series G led by Franklin Templeton at a $28 billion post-money valuation in February 2021. Other investors include Amazon Web Services, CapitalG (a growth equity firm under Alphabet Inc.) and Salesforce Ventures. In August 2021, Databricks finished its eighth round of funding by raising $1.6 billion and valuing the company at $38 billion.

In December 2024, Databricks announced a $10 billion financing at a valuation of $62 billion. In August 2025, Databricks announced a $1 billion Series K funding round, raising their valuation to over $100 billion. Just 3 months later, in December 2025, Databricks completed a $4 billion Series L funding round at a new valuation of $134 billion.

In July 2026, Coatue Management led a funding round for a $3 billion investment in Databricks, making the company's overall valuation $188 billion.

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