Who Founded Databricks?

Ali Ghodsi is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Databricks, Inc. A effective distributed systems researcher and entrepreneur, Ghodsi co-created Apache Spark alongside Matei Zaharia at UC Berkeley, anticipating the large explosion of big data and distributed machine learning. Since becoming CEO in 2016, Ghodsi has taken Databricks from an open-source startup to a $7B+ revenue run-rate (August 2026) and a $190 billion valuation. He championed the lakehouse strategy, the first-party Azure Databricks partnership with Microsoft, and acquisitions including MosaicML ($1.3B, 2023), Tabular (2024), and Neon (2025).

Ali Ghodsi was born in 1978. Education: University of California, Berkeley; Mid Sweden University.

Matei Zaharia (born 1985) created the Apache Spark processing engine in 2009 to vastly improve the speed of machine learning workloads compared to Hadoop MapReduce. In 2013, he co-founded Databricks with his AMPLab colleagues to commercialize Spark as a managed cloud service. He serves as Chief Technologist, driving the company's expansion into AI and LLM infrastructure.

Education: University of California, Berkeley; University of Waterloo; University of California, Berkeley.

Zaharia was born in 1984 or 1985 and is Romanian-Canadian. He created Apache Spark and has developed open-source projects including Delta Lake and MLflow.

Reynold Xin co-founded Databricks in 2013. He has served as the company's Chief Architect, heavily influencing the technical design of the Databricks Lakehouse platform and leading the engineering organization scaling the underlying distributed computing infrastructure.

Education: University of Toronto; University of California, Berkeley.

Xin is chief architect of Databricks. On Apache Spark he was designer and lead developer of the GraphX, Project Tungsten and Structured Streaming components, and co-designed DataFrames. (Exact birth year remains publicly undisclosed).

Patrick Wendell co-founded Databricks in 2013. He has held various vice president roles in engineering, directly managing the development teams responsible for the core Databricks runtime environment and its enterprise integrations. (Exact birth year remains publicly undisclosed).

Andy Konwinski co-founded Databricks and previously helped create Apache Mesos. At Databricks, he has led product management and enterprise strategy, ensuring the open-source Spark engine was packaged into a highly profitable, enterprise-ready SaaS product. (Exact birth year remains publicly undisclosed).

Scott Shenker (born 1956) is a highly cited computer networking researcher. As a co-founder of Databricks and Nicira (acquired by VMware), his academic lab at Berkeley served as the incubator for the foundational distributed computing technologies that power the company. (Exact birth year remains publicly undisclosed).

Ion Stoica (born 1965) is a renowned computer scientist who previously co-founded Conviva. He served as the initial CEO of Databricks from 2013 until 2016, guiding the company through its early venture capital rounds before handing the role to Ali Ghodsi. He remains Executive Chairman.

Education: Carnegie Mellon University; Politehnica University of Bucharest.

Stoica was born in 1964 or 1965 and is Romanian-American. He is a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, and also co-founded Conviva and Anyscale.

Arsalan Tavakoli-Shiraji is a Databricks co-founder who focused on the commercial side of the business, including field engineering and customer-facing roles that helped large enterprises adopt the platform in its early years. (Exact birth year remains publicly undisclosed).