How Databricks grew from a school project to a multi-billion dollar

We will talk about the steady growth of the finances of the company, mainly through all its public funding, its major partnerships and its upgrades to its software. Databricks, is an American enterprise software company founded in the year 2013, by the creators of Apache Spark.

The company develops a web-based platform for working with spark, that provides automated cluster management and IPhyton-style notebooks. Databricks grew out of the A.M.P. Lab project at the University of California, Berkeley, that was involved in making Apache Spark, an open-source distributed computing framework built atop scala. The creators of this company are; Ali Ghodsi, Andy Konwinski, Arsalan Tavakoli, Ion Stoica, Matei Zaharia, Patrick Wendell and Reynold Xin.

Databricks has its headquarters situated in San Francisco. The Databricks project began in 2013 as a way to use Spark more conveniently. In other words, Databricks is Spark but with a nice G.U.I. on top and many automated easy-to-use features. The platform can be used for auto machine learning, cyber security analysis, deep learning, general data protection regulation, genomics, machine learning and graph processing.

For a little clarity, Apache Spark is an open-source unified analytics engine, for large-scale data processing or in simpler terms, Spark provides an interface for programming clusters with implicit data parallelism and fault tolerance.

In September 25th 2013, Databricks announced it had raised 14 million dollars, in its series A funding round from Andreessen Horowitz, which is a U.S. venture capital firm, founded by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz in 2009.

The company also announced along with the funding, that Ben Horowitz would become part of its board. By June 30th the next year, Databricks announced, that it had received 33 million dollars in funding, from New Enterprise Associates, Data Collective DCVC and Andreessen Holowitz in the series B funding.

It was also at that period, that the company launched their first cloud product called the Databricks cloud. It consisted of the Databricks platform, Spark and the Databricks workspace. Two years later, on December 15th, 2016,

Databricks announced raising 60 million dollars, in series C funding, from New Enterprise Associates, Sine Wave Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. Ali Ghodsi, the CEO and co-founder of Databricks, made the following statement regarding the company’s series C funding. “Apache Spark has enabled countless enterprises and cutting-edge early adopters to create business value through advanced analytic solutions.

As Sparks adoption and the demand for our managed spark platform continues to rise, this funding will advance our engineering and go-to-market strategies, to address all of our customer’s pain points as we continue to grow the spark community. The Series D funding took place in August 22, 2017, and Databricks announced that the revenue raised for that year’s series funding was the sum of 140 million dollars, from the investors; New Enterprise Associates, Green Bay Ventures, Geodesic Capital and Battery Ventures. The company stated that the intention of its series D funding was to accelerate its growth, develop its product and grow its engineering and customer success teams.

Databricks was announced as a first-party service on Microsoft Azure, via the integration of Azure Databricks in November 2017. The company developed Delta Lake, an open-source project aimed at bringing reliability to Data Lakes for machine learning and other data science use cases.

February 5th, 2019, saw the series E funding take place and the announcement made by Databricks was that the fund raised was 250 million dollars with Andreessen Horowitz being the lead investor then participating investors being Microsoft, Green Bay Ventures, Geodesic Capital, Founders future, Coatue Management and Battery Ventures. The company’s valuation was calculated to be 2.5 billion dollars after the funding. Anthony Schitter the co-founder of Green Bay Ventures made this statement regarding his firm’s participation in Databrick’s series E round: “what Ali and the Databricks team have built is truly phenomenal. Their success is a testament to product innovation at the highest level. Databricks is without question, the best in class and its impact on the industry proves it.  We are thrilled to participate in this round. On the 22nd of October 2019, Databricks announced raising 400 million dollars, in the series F funding from Andreessen Horowitz, T. Rowe Price, New Enterprise Associates, Microsoft, Green Boy Ventures, Geodesic Capital, Dragonner Investment Group, Coatue Management and Black Rock. This time around their company evaluation was at 6.2 billion dollars. The firm stated that the plans for the funding were to expand their customer adoption and perform research & development.

Databricks also ranked 13th on the Forbes Cloud 100 list in 2019.

Almost a year after the funding, on June 2020, the company acquired Redash, an open-source tool designed to help data scientists and analysts, visualize and build interactive dashboards of their data. They also launched Delta engine as a new query engine that layers on top of Delta Lake to boost query performance. It is compatible Apache Spark and MLflow, which are also open-source projects from Databricks.

By November, Databricks also introduced Databricks SQL, to be used for running business intelligence and analytics reporting on top of Delta Lakes. An analyst can query data sets directly with standard SQL, or use product connectors to integrate with business tools like Tableau, Qlik, Looker and Thoughtspot.

The company moved from the spot of 13th to the 5th spot on the Forbes ranking for the cloud 100 lists, on September 2020.

Databricks partnered with Google Cloud on February 2021, to provide integration with the Google Kubernetes Engine and Google Big Query Platform.

Fortune ranked Databricks as one of the best large workspaces for Millennials in 2021.

At the time, the company said that more than 5000 organizations used its products. By August in the series H funding round, Databrick raised 1.6 billion dollars. Investors that participated were Counterpoint Global, Ballie Gifford, Clear Bridge Investments and UC investments, Andreessen Horowitz, Black Rock, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, Coatue Management, Fidelity Management and Research, Franklin Templeton, GIC, Greenoaks, Octahedron Capital, T. Rowe Price Associates INC,  Tiger Global Management, Whale Rock Capital Management, Alta Park Capital, Discovery Capital, Dragonner Investment Group, Flucas Ventures, Gaingels, Geodesic, Green Bay Ventures, the House Fund, Insight Partners and New Enterprise Associates. After this funding round, the evaluation of the company rose to a sum of 38 billion dollars.

By October, Databricks, made its second acquisition of a German no-code company, 8080 Labs. 8080 Labs makes Bamboolib, a data exploration tool that does not require coding to use. Today, more than 7000 organizations worldwide use Databricks services, as the majority of companies today rely on Databricks to enable massive-scale data engineering, collaborative data science, full-lifecycle machine learning and business analysis. The company has also grown to an employee number of 3000. 

Apart from the head office in San Francisco, Databricks has operations in Canada, the UK, the Netherlands, Singapore, Australia, Germany, France, Japan, China, India and Brazil.