Databricks
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Company type | Private |
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Industry | Computer software |
Founded | 2013 |
Founders |
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Headquarters | , United States |
Key people |
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Revenue | ![]() |
Number of employees | c. 5,500 (2023)[2] |
Website | databricks |
Databricks, Inc. is a global data, analytics and artificial intelligence company founded by the original creators of Apache Spark.[3]
The company provides a cloud-based platform to help enterprises build, scale, and govern data and AI, including generative AI and other machine learning models.[4]
Databricks pioneered the data lakehouse, a data and AI platform that combines the capabilities of a data warehouse with a data lake, allowing organizations to manage and use both structured and unstructured data for traditional business analytics and AI workloads.[5]
In November 2023, Databricks unveiled the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, a new offering that combines the unification benefits of the lakehouse with MosaicML’s Generative AI technology to enable customers to better understand and use their own proprietary data.[6]
The company develops Delta Lake, an open-source project to bring reliability to data lakes for machine learning and other data science use cases.[7]
History
[edit]![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fd/DatabricksBooth.jpg/220px-DatabricksBooth.jpg)
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,[8] Patrick Wendell, and Reynold Xin.
In November 2017, the company was announced as a first-party service on Microsoft Azure via integration Azure Databricks.[9] In February 2021 together with Google Cloud, Databricks provided integration with the Google Kubernetes Engine and Google's BigQuery platform.[10] By this time, the company said more than 5,000 organizations used its products.[11]
Fortune ranked Databricks as one of the best large "Workplaces for Millennials" in 2021.[12]
Acquisitions
[edit]Much of the company's expansion has come through acquisition. In June 2020, they acquired Redash, an open-source tool designed to help data scientists and analysts visualize and build interactive dashboards of their data.[13] Their second acquisition was of German no-code company 8080 Labs, the makers of bamboolib, a data exploration tool requires no coding to use.[14] The third acquisition was in May 2023, of the data security group Okera, extending their data governance capabilities.[15] The next month, they bought the open-source generative AI startup MosaicML for $1.4 billion.[16][17] In October of that year Databricks acquired data replication startup Arcion for $100 million.[18] In what is believed to be the sixth acquisition the company bought Tabular, a data-management system used by open source AI, for over $1 billion.[19]
In response to the popularity of OpenAI's ChatGPT, in March 2023, the company introduced an open-source language model, named Dolly after Dolly the sheep, that developers could use to create their own chatbots. Their model uses fewer parameters to produce similar results as ChatGPT, but Databricks had not released formal benchmark tests to show whether its bot actually matched the performance of ChatGPT.[20][21][22]
Databricks reported $1.6 billion in revenue for the 2023 fiscal year, more than doubling its previous level.[23]
Funding
[edit]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.[24][25] Microsoft was a noted investor of Databricks in 2019, participating in the company's Series E at an unspecified amount.[26][27] 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.[11] In August 2021, Databricks finished its eighth round of funding by raising $1.6 billion and valuing the company at $38 billion.[28]
Series | Date | Amount (million $) | Lead investors |
---|---|---|---|
A | 2013 | 13.9[24] | Andreessen Horowitz |
B | 2014 | 33[29] | New Enterprise Associates |
C | 2016 | 60[30] | New Enterprise Associates |
D | 2017 | 140[31] | Andreessen Horowitz |
E | Feb. 2019 | 250[32] | Andreessen Horowitz |
F | Oct. 2019 | 400[33] | Andreessen Horowitz |
G | Jan. 2021 | 1,000[34] | Franklin Templeton Investments |
H | Aug. 2021 | 1,600[35] | Morgan Stanley |
I | Sep. 2023 | 500[36] | Capital One Ventures, Nvidia |
Products
[edit]Databricks develops and sells a cloud data platform using the marketing term "lakehouse", a portmanteau based on the terms "data warehouse" and "data lake".[37] Databricks' lakehouse is based on the open source Apache Spark framework that allows analytical queries against semi-structured data without a traditional database schema.[38] In October 2022, Lakehouse received FedRAMP authorized status for use with the U.S. federal government and contractors.[39]
Databricks' Delta Engine launched in June 2020 as a new query engine that layers on top of Delta Lake to boost query performance.[40] It is compatible with Apache Spark and MLflow, which are also open source projects Databricks employees helped create.[41]
In November 2020, Databricks introduced Databricks SQL (previously known as SQL Analytics) for running business intelligence and analytics reporting on top of data lakes. Analysts can query data sets directly with standard SQL or use product connectors to integrate directly with business intelligence tools like Holistics, Tableau, Qlik, SigmaComputing, Looker, and ThoughtSpot.[42]
Databricks offers a platform for other workloads, including machine learning, data storage and processing, streaming analytics, and business intelligence.[43]
The company has also created Delta Lake, MLflow and Koalas, open source projects that span data engineering, data science and machine learning.[44][45] In addition to building the Databricks platform, the company has co-organized massive open online courses about Spark[46] and a conference for the Spark community called the Data + AI Summit,[47] formerly known as Spark Summit.
In early 2024, Databricks released a portfolio of new tools to help customers customize, fine-tune or build their own AI systems, including: Mosaic AI Vector Search, which enables companies to build RAG models, Mosaic AI Model Serving, a unified service for deploying, governing, querying and monitoring models fine-tuned or pre-deployed by Databricks, and Mosaic AI Pretraining, a platform for enterprises to create their own LLMs.[48]
In March 2024, Databricks released DBRX, an open source foundation model. It relies on a mixture-of-experts architecture and is built on the MegaBlocks open source project.[49]
DBRX cost $10 million to create. At the time of launch, it was the fastest open source LLM, based on commonly-used industry benchmarks. It beat other models like LlaMA2 at solving logic puzzles and answering general knowledge questions, among other tasks. And while it’s a 136 billion parameters model, it uses only an average of 36 billion to generate outputs.[50]
DBRX also serves as a foundation for companies to build or customize their own AI models. Companies can also use proprietary data to generate higher-quality outputs for specific use cases.[51]
Operations
[edit]Databricks is headquartered in San Francisco.[52] It also has operations in Canada, the United Kingdom, Netherlands, Singapore, Australia, Germany, France, Japan, China, South Korea, India, Brazil, Switzerland, Costa Rica and Serbia.[53]
References
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- ^ Corrie, Driebusch (July 29, 2023). "The Tech CEO Who Uses His Phone the Old-Fashioned Way". The Wall Street Journal. Archived from the original on February 28, 2024.
- ^ Saul, Derek (September 14, 2023). "Top IPO Prospect Databricks Scores $43 Billion Valuation Thanks To $500 Million Funding Round Including AI Titan Nvidia". Forbes. Retrieved March 26, 2024.
- ^ Sullivan, Mark (March 19, 2024). "How Databricks is helping customers develop their own customized AI models". Fast Company. Retrieved March 19, 2024.
- ^ Clark, Lindsay (November 16, 2023). "Databricks' lakehouse becomes foundation under fresh layer of AI dreams". The Register. Retrieved November 16, 2023.
- ^ Cai, Kenrick (November 16, 2023). "Databricks' New AI Product Adds A ChatGPT-Like Interface To Its Software". Forbes. Retrieved November 16, 2023.
- ^ "Databricks launches Delta Lake, an open source data lake reliability project". VentureBeat. April 24, 2019. Retrieved April 6, 2021.
- ^ Zaharia, Matei. "Matei Zaharia". Retrieved August 16, 2016.
- ^ "Microsoft makes Databricks a first-party service on Azure". TechCrunch. November 15, 2017. Retrieved April 6, 2021.
- ^ "Databricks brings its lakehouse to Google Cloud". TechCrunch. February 17, 2021. Retrieved February 18, 2021.
- ^ a b Konrad, Alex (February 2, 2021). "Databricks Raises $1 Billion At $28 Billion Valuation, With The Cloud's Elite All Buying In". Forbes. Retrieved July 29, 2021.
- ^ "100 Best Large Workplaces for Millennials". Fortune. June 16, 2021. Retrieved July 16, 2021.
- ^ "Databricks acquires Redash, a visualizations service for data scientists". TechCrunch. June 24, 2020. Retrieved April 6, 2021.
- ^ Eric Rosenbaum (October 6, 2021). "$38 billion software start-up Databricks makes acquisition to leave code behind". CNBC. Retrieved February 20, 2022.
- ^ Palazzolo, Stephanie (May 3, 2023). "Exclusive: $38 billion data and AI darling Databricks acquires security startup Okera". Business Insider. Archived from the original on May 3, 2023.
- ^ Datta, Tiyashi; Hu, Krystal (June 26, 2023). "Databricks strikes $1.3 billion deal for generative AI startup MosaicML". Reuters.
- ^ Council, Stephen (June 26, 2023). "SF tech firm Databricks to buy 2-year-old startup for $21 million per employee". SFGATE.
- ^ "After $43B valuation, Databricks acquires data replication startup Arcion for $100M". TechCrunch. October 23, 2023. Retrieved October 23, 2023.
- ^ Galloni, Allessandra, ed. (June 5, 2024). "Databricks to buy data management firm Tabular for over $1 bln". Reuters.
- ^ Hu, Krystal; Nellis, Stephen (March 24, 2023). "Databricks pushes open-source chatbot as cheaper ChatGPT alternative". Reuters. Archived from the original on March 25, 2023.
- ^ Loften, Angus (March 24, 2023). "Databricks Launches 'Dolly,' Another ChatGPT Rival". The Wall Street Journal. Archived from the original on March 24, 2023.
- ^ Goldman, Sharon (March 24, 2023). "Databricks debuts ChatGPT-like Dolly, a clone any enterprise can own". VentureBeat. Archived from the original on April 11, 2023.
- ^ Wilhelm, Ron Miller and Alex (March 7, 2024). "Databricks keeps marching forward with $1.6B in revenue". TechCrunch. Retrieved March 8, 2024.
- ^ a b Harris, Derrick (September 25, 2013). "Databricks raises $14M from Andreessen Horowitz, wants to take on MapReduce with Spark". Archived from the original on January 15, 2022. Retrieved September 28, 2014.
- ^ Lorica, Ben (September 25, 2013). "Databricks aims to build next-generation analytic tools for Big Data". O'Reilly Media. Retrieved September 28, 2014.
- ^ "Databricks raises $250M at a $2.75B valuation for its analytics platform". TechCrunch. February 5, 2019. Retrieved April 8, 2021.
- ^ Novet, Jordan (February 5, 2019). "Microsoft used to scare start-ups but is now an 'outstandingly good partner,' says Silicon Valley investor Ben Horowitz". CNBC. Retrieved April 6, 2021.
- ^ Mellor, Chris (September 1, 2021). "Databricks raises data lake of cash at monstrous $380bn valuation". Blocks & Files. Retrieved September 4, 2021.
- ^ Miller, Ron (June 30, 2014). "Databricks Snags $33M In Series B And Debuts Cloud Platform For Processing Big Data". TechCrunch. Retrieved September 28, 2014.
- ^ Shieber, Jonathan (December 15, 2016). "Databricks raises $60 million to be big data's next great leap forward". TechCrunch. Retrieved December 16, 2016.
- ^ "Databricks Secures $140 Million to Accelerate Analytics and Artificial Intelligence in the Enterprise". Databricks. August 22, 2017. Retrieved May 16, 2019.
- ^ "Databricks' $250 Million Funding Supports Explosive Growth and Global Demand for Unified Analytics; Brings Valuation to $2.75 Billion". Databricks. February 5, 2019. Retrieved February 5, 2019.
- ^ "Databricks announces $400M round on $6.2B valuation as analytics platform continues to grow". TechCrunch. October 22, 2019. Retrieved October 24, 2019.
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- ^ Nishant, Niket; Hu, Krystal (September 14, 2023). "Databricks raises over $500 mln at $43 bln valuation". Reuters. Retrieved September 20, 2023.
- ^ Michael, Armbrust; Ghodsi, Ali; Xin, Reynold; Zaharia, Matei (January 2021). "Lakehouse: A New Generation of Open Platforms that Unify Data Warehousing and Advanced Analytics" (PDF). Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research. Retrieved July 29, 2021.
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- ^ "Databricks Cranks Delta Lake Performance, Nabs Redash for SQL Viz". Datanami. June 24, 2020. Retrieved April 8, 2021.
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- ^ "Data + AI Summit". Databricks. Retrieved April 8, 2021.
- ^ "Riding the data-powered AI wave: Inside Databricks' unified stack solution". Databricks. March 14, 2024. Retrieved April 5, 2024.
- ^ "Databricks open-sources its own large language model, DBRX". Databricks. March 27, 2024. Retrieved April 5, 2024.
- ^ "Inside the Creation of the World's Most Powerful Open Source AI Model". Databricks. March 27, 2024. Retrieved April 5, 2024.
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- ^ "Worldwide locations". Retrieved October 20, 2022.