Databricks

Databricks was founded in 2013 by the creators of Apache Spark at the University of California, Berkeley, among them Ali Ghodsi, who leads it as CEO, Matei Zaharia and Ion Stoica. It is privately held and headquartered in San Francisco.

Its Data Intelligence Platform is built on the lakehouse idea: data engineering, warehousing, business intelligence and machine learning in one place, on open formats, running on AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. It includes Unity Catalog for governance, Databricks SQL, the Lakebase Postgres database and Mosaic AI for building models and agents. The company says more than 20,000 organizations use it.

Databricks has more than 10,000 employees and over 30 offices in more than 20 countries, with engineering sites in the Bay Area, Seattle, Amsterdam, Berlin, Belgrade, Aarhus, Zurich and Bengaluru. Much of its stack is open source, including Spark, Delta Lake and MLflow, written mostly in Scala, Java and Python, while the Photon query engine is written in C++.