Founder Profile
Ali Ghodsi
Last reviewed: October 2026 · By Swet Parvadiya
Who is Ali Ghodsi?
Ali Ghodsi is a founder of Databricks, Inc., which was founded in 2013 with Matei Zaharia, Reynold Xin, Patrick Wendell, Andy Konwinski, Scott Shenker, Ion Stoica and Arsalan Tavakoli-Shiraji.
- Company founded
- Databricks, Inc.
- Founded
- 2013
- Co-founders
- Matei Zaharia, Reynold Xin, Patrick Wendell, Andy Konwinski, Scott Shenker, Ion Stoica and Arsalan Tavakoli-Shiraji
Background
Ali Ghodsi holds a deeply rigorous academic background forged at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden and the elite UC Berkeley AMPLab. His formative background researching peer-to-peer data transfers and distributed computing alongside computer science giants provided him with the precise theoretical and operational framework required to commercialize Apache Spark and successfully navigate Databricks through its early, highly volatile startup phase.
Founding Story
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.