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databricks

Journey of Databricks from Academia To A $6.2 Billion Business

Apache Spark’s developers formed the American enterprise software startup Databricks.

Databricks creates a web-based Spark platform with IPython-style notebooks and automatic cluster management.

About the Company

Databricks, a startup with headquarters in San Francisco, was established in 2013 and has roots in both open-source development and academia.

Databricks
Image Source: capterra.com

The company, which was created by seven co-founders and is propelled by enormous industry potential, aids data professionals, scientists, analysts, and engineers in cooperating to uncover value in data and develop solutions to the most difficult challenges in the world.

Databricks’ seven co-founders, all of whom were researchers at UC Berkeley, were able to capitalize on the idea that, when coupled with A.I., data offers the potential to treat illnesses, save lives, combat climate change, and even alter how we live.

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As a result, Databricks offers the only open, unified platform for full-lifecycle machine learning, business analytics, and massive-scale data management. This enables data teams to innovate more quickly and collaboratively.

History

Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi has been interested in programming since his parents gave him an old Commodore 64 when he was eight years old. He pursued a Ph.D. in distributed computing as well as further study in computer engineering. Later, in 2009, he teamed up with Ion Stoica to establish “Spark,” which Matei Zaharia had already started.

They further collaborated with another machine learning team, and the two of them jointly launched “Apache Spark” on the market. Companies first paid little attention since the technology seemed foreign.

They were given some hope in 2013 when Ben Horowitz, co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz VC, invested $14 million in them and pushed them to create a business that would act as a platform for Apache Spark. As a result, Databricks was founded in 2013.

Success Story

Databricks’ technology, Spark, experienced tremendous growth and widespread use in 2015.

The rumor that the technology doesn’t operate if the data does not fit in the RAM was getting on the nerves of Databricks’ founders. They made the decision to turn to the market.

They participated in a nerdy contest. Reynold, co-founder and chief architect of Databricks, assisted the team in breaking the world record by sorting one petabyte of data at the fastest speed ever while using a lot less memory than one petabyte.

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Due to media coverage of the accomplishment, Spark quickly rose to the top of the Gartner Hype Cycle and became the most widely used software. Databricks raised $883 million in several Series fundings between 2014 and 2019. Microsoft took part in the Series E fundraising round that helped to establish Azure Databricks in 2019.

The company announced that the company had made over $200 million in revenue that year. In the 2020 Magic Quadrant for Data Science and Machine Learning Platforms, research company Gartner named Databricks as a Leader. In the 2020 Cloud 100, the company was rated fifth.

As more businesses try to integrate data analytics into their daily operations, Databricks is now one of the pioneers in machine learning and data science.

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