Databricks

Databricks, Inc. is an American data and artificial intelligence software company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It offers a unified, open cloud platform — marketed as the Databricks Data + AI Platform (also referred to as the Data Intelligence Platform) — for building, deploying, sharing and maintaining enterprise-grade data, analytics and AI solutions. The platform integrates with the customer's cloud storage and security perimeter and manages and deploys cloud infrastructure on the customer's behalf, operating natively across Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.

The company developed the 'data lakehouse' architecture, which combines elements of data warehouses and data lakes to manage structured and unstructured data on a single foundation. Product components include Lakehouse (serverless data warehousing on open lake data), Lakeflow (batch and streaming ETL pipelines and orchestration), Unity Catalog (unified governance and secure data sharing, including a managed version of OpenSharing), AI/BI dashboards and the Genie natural-language analytics agent, Agent Bricks for building production AI agents, Lakebase (a serverless Postgres/OLTP database positioned for AI agents), Unity AI Gateway (multi-AI governance and cost control), Databricks Apps and Lakewatch. Additional platform capabilities span machine learning and data science tooling (MLflow, Databricks Runtime for ML, Hugging Face Transformers, DeepSpeed), SQL warehouses and notebooks supporting SQL, Python, R and Scala, AI functions that expose LLMs inside SQL pipelines, and DevOps/CI-CD features such as Jobs and Declarative Automation Bundles.

Databricks also functions as a managed AI infrastructure provider, making proprietary foundation models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google Gemini available within its secure perimeter, and has announced Genie Code, an autonomous agent for data engineering, data science and analytics tasks. In 2023 it released Dolly, an open-source 6-billion-parameter instruction-following language model.

Founding story

Databricks grew out of the AMPLab project at the University of California, Berkeley, which produced Apache Spark, an open-source distributed computing framework built on Scala. It was founded in 2013 by the original creators of Apache Spark and the lakehouse architecture: Ali Ghodsi, Andy Konwinski, Arsalan Tavakoli-Shiraji, Ion Stoica, Matei Zaharia, Patrick Wendell and Reynold Xin. The company describes its origins as being in academia and the open source community, and it also originated the Delta Lake, MLflow and Unity Catalog projects.

Business model

Databricks sells a cloud-based enterprise software platform deployed on top of customers' own cloud accounts across AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, including through the Microsoft-operated Azure Databricks first-party service. It reports results on an annual recurring revenue basis, indicating subscription/consumption-style commercial arrangements, and offers free trials and demos alongside enterprise sales. A partner ecosystem of more than 1,200 cloud, ISV and consulting partners resells and implements solutions for joint customers.

Recurring platform revenue: Wikipedia cites $6.9 billion ARR as of June 2026 (up 80% year over year) and $1.6 billion revenue for fiscal 2023, and a company press release headline states the business surpassed a $7 billion revenue run-rate while growing more than 80% year over year in August 2026.

Traction

More than 20,000 organizations worldwide use the platform, including 70% of the Fortune 500 per company materials (the website cites over 60% of the Fortune 500). Customer count grew from more than 5,000 reported in February 2021. Reported revenue was $1.6 billion in fiscal 2023, $6.9 billion ARR in June 2026 growing 80% year over year, and a stated surpassing of a $7 billion revenue run-rate in August 2026; the company was free-cash-flow positive in 2025 and employed about 10,000 people in 2026, including roughly 3,000 software engineers.

Latest developments

On July 16, 2026 Databricks announced it had signed a term sheet for a strategic funding round at a $188 billion valuation led by existing investor Coatue, expected to close later that summer; TechCrunch reported the raise as roughly $3 billion and noted the amount was not officially disclosed. Proceeds are earmarked for Unity AI Gateway, Genie and Lakebase, plus future AI acquisitions and AI research. In July 2026 Databricks and Microsoft announced an expanded mutual integration extending into the 2030s, with Databricks using Azure and Microsoft Cobalt processors and Microsoft embedding Databricks technology including Genie into Microsoft 365, Teams and Copilot. In June 2026 the company announced CustomerLake, an agentic customer data platform for marketing, and agreed to acquire Panther Labs; in August 2026 it acquired Electric and reported growth above 80% year over year past a $7 billion revenue run-rate. Databricks has also publicized internal benchmarking favoring open-weight models such as Z.ai's GLM 5.2 for coding, and announced Genie Code, an autonomous data agent.