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Databricks

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Databricks, Inc.
Company typePrivate
IndustryComputer software
Founded2013; 11 years ago (2013)
Founders
Headquarters
San Francisco, California
,
United States
Key people
  • Ali Ghodsi
  • (CEO)
  • Ion Stoica
  • (Executive chairman)
RevenueIncrease $1.6 billion (2023)[1]
Number of employees
c. 5,500 (2023)[2]
Websitedatabricks.com

Databricks, Inc. is a global data, analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI) 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

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Databricks booth (2023).

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.[citation needed]

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

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Much of the company's expansion has come through acquisition. In June 2020, it bought Redash, an open-source tool for data visualization and building of interactive dashboards.[13] In 2021, it bought German no-code company 8080 Labs whose product, bamboolib, allowed data exploration without any coding.[14] In May 2023, Databricks bought data security group Okera, extending Databricks data governance capabilities.[15] In June, it bought the open-source generative AI startup MosaicML for $1.4 billion.[16][17] In October, Databricks bought data replication startup Arcion for $100 million.[18] In what is believed to be its sixth acquisition, Databricks bought Tabular, a data-management system used by open source AI, for over $1 billion.[19]

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 allowed developers to create chatbots. Dolly 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

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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]

Funding rounds
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

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Databricks develops and sells a cloud data platform using the marketing term "lakehouse", a portmanteau of "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]

The company has also created Delta Lake, MLflow and Koalas, open source projects that span data engineering, data science and machine learning.[40][41]

In June 2020, Databricks launched Delta Engine, a fast query engine for Delta Lake,[42] compatible with Apache Spark and MLflow.[43]

In November 2020, Databricks introduced Databricks SQL (previously called SQL Analytics) for running business intelligence and analytics reporting on top of data lakes. Analysts can query data sets with standard SQL or use connectors to integrate with business intelligence tools like Holistics,[44] Tableau, Qlik, SigmaComputing,[45] Looker, and ThoughtSpot.[46]

Databricks offers a platform for other workloads, including machine learning, data storage and processing, streaming analytics, and business intelligence.[47]

In early 2024, Databricks released the Mosaic set of tools for customizing, fine-tuning and building AI systems. It includes AI Vector Search for building RAG models; AI Model Serving, a service for deploying, governing, querying and monitoring models fine-tuned or pre-deployed by Databricks; and AI Pretraining, a platform for enterprises to create their own LLMs.[48]

In March 2024, Databricks released DBRX, an open-source foundation model. It has 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 has 136 billion parameters, it only uses 36 billion, on average, 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]

In addition to building the Databricks platform, the company has co-organized massive open online courses about Spark[52] and a conference for the Spark community called the Data AI Summit,[53] formerly known as Spark Summit.[citation needed]

Operations

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Databricks is headquartered in San Francisco.[54] It also has operations in Canada, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere.[55]

See also

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References

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  1. ^ Lin, Belle (March 6, 2024). "AI is Driving Record Sales at Multibillion-Dollar Databricks. An IPO Can Wait …". The Wall Street Journal. Archived from the original on March 6, 2024.
  2. ^ 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.
  3. ^ Saul, Derek (September 14, 2023). "Top IPO Prospect Databricks Scores $43 Billion Valuation Thanks To $500 Million Funding Round Including AI Titan Nvidia". Forbes. Archived from the original on September 4, 2024. Retrieved March 26, 2024.
  4. ^ Sullivan, Mark (March 19, 2024). "How Databricks is helping customers develop their own customized AI models". Fast Company. Retrieved March 19, 2024.
  5. ^ Clark, Lindsay (November 16, 2023). "Databricks' lakehouse becomes foundation under fresh layer of AI dreams". The Register. Archived from the original on September 4, 2024. Retrieved November 16, 2023.
  6. ^ Cai, Kenrick (November 16, 2023). "Databricks' New AI Product Adds A ChatGPT-Like Interface To Its Software". Forbes. Archived from the original on September 4, 2024. Retrieved November 16, 2023.
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  19. ^ Galloni, Allessandra, ed. (June 5, 2024). "Databricks to buy data management firm Tabular for over $1 bln". Reuters.
  20. ^ 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.
  21. ^ Loften, Angus (March 24, 2023). "Databricks Launches 'Dolly,' Another ChatGPT Rival". The Wall Street Journal. Archived from the original on March 24, 2023.
  22. ^ 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.
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  30. ^ Shieber, Jonathan (December 15, 2016). "Databricks raises $60 million to be big data's next great leap forward". TechCrunch. Archived from the original on December 15, 2016. Retrieved December 16, 2016.
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  40. ^ "The Two Sigma Ventures Open Source Index". Two Sigma Ventures. Archived from the original on November 29, 2022. Retrieved April 8, 2021.
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  44. ^ https://holistics.io/
  45. ^ https://www.sigmacomputing.com
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  49. ^ "Databricks open-sources its own large language model, DBRX". Databricks. March 27, 2024. Archived from the original on April 5, 2024. Retrieved April 5, 2024.
  50. ^ "Inside the Creation of the World's Most Powerful Open Source AI Model". Databricks. March 27, 2024. Archived from the original on September 4, 2024. Retrieved April 5, 2024.
  51. ^ "Databricks' new open-source AI model could offer enterprises a leaner alternative to OpenAI's GPT-3.5". Databricks. March 27, 2024. Archived from the original on September 4, 2024. Retrieved April 5, 2024.
  52. ^ "Databricks to run two massive online courses on Apache Spark". Databricks. December 2, 2014. Archived from the original on January 13, 2022. Retrieved December 16, 2016.
  53. ^ "Data AI Summit". Databricks. Archived from the original on April 23, 2022. Retrieved April 8, 2021.
  54. ^ staff, CNBC com (June 16, 2020). "36. Databricks". CNBC. Archived from the original on December 24, 2022. Retrieved April 8, 2021.
  55. ^ "Worldwide locations". Archived from the original on June 7, 2023. Retrieved October 20, 2022.

Bibliography

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