Founder Profile
Matei Zaharia
Last reviewed: October 2026 · By Swet Parvadiya
Who is Matei Zaharia?
Matei Zaharia is a founder of Databricks, Inc., which was founded in 2013 with Ali Ghodsi, Reynold Xin, Patrick Wendell, Andy Konwinski, Scott Shenker, Ion Stoica and Arsalan Tavakoli-Shiraji.
- Company founded
- Databricks, Inc.
- Founded
- 2013
- Co-founders
- Ali Ghodsi, Reynold Xin, Patrick Wendell, Andy Konwinski, Scott Shenker, Ion Stoica and Arsalan Tavakoli-Shiraji
Background
Computer scientist who created Apache Spark during his PhD studies at UC Berkeley's AMPLab.
Founding Story
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.