Databricks

Holds an MBA from Mid-Sweden University and a Ph.D. in Distributed Computing from KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden (2006), where he co-authored influential papers on Apache Mesos and Apache Spark SQL. He is an adjunct professor at UC Berkeley. Before Databricks he co-founded Peerialism AB (2006), acquired by Global Gaming Factory. He co-founded Databricks in 2013 with six Berkeley AMPLab colleagues and took over as CEO in January 2016, guiding the company to a $62B valuation following a $10B fundraise in December 2024.

Romanian-American computer scientist; M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Polytechnic University of Bucharest and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon. A professor at UC Berkeley since 2000, he co-directs AMPLab and has authored over 100 peer-reviewed papers on distributed systems, networking, and big data. He co-founded Databricks in 2013, serving as its initial CEO before becoming Executive Chairman in 2016. He also co-founded Conviva and Anyscale, and donated $25M to Berkeley's computing and data science initiatives.

Romanian-Canadian computer scientist; B.Math from the University of Waterloo and Ph.D. from UC Berkeley's AMPLab, where he created Apache Spark in 2009 as a faster alternative to MapReduce. He received the 2014 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award and the 2026 ACM Prize in Computing for his open-source contributions, including MLflow, Delta Lake, and Dolly. As an Associate Professor at Stanford and co-founder of Databricks (2013), he serves as Chief Technologist, shaping the platform's AI and data lakehouse architecture at a $62B valuation.

One of the seven Apache Spark co-creators from UC Berkeley's AMPLab who co-founded Databricks in 2013. A core Apache Spark committer and PMC member, Wendell was instrumental in Spark's early development and helped architect key components of the engine. His deep open-source background in distributed data processing underpins Databricks' technical foundations. He continues in a technical leadership capacity at the company.

One of the original Apache Spark contributors from UC Berkeley's AMPLab who co-founded Databricks in 2013. He is known for his significant contributions to Spark SQL and the DataFrame API, work that made Spark accessible to a much broader audience of data engineers and analysts. At Databricks he has focused on data reliability and governance, including leading development of Delta Lake, the open-source ACID storage layer now widely adopted across the industry.

Ph.D. from UC Berkeley's AMPLab and one of the seven co-founders of Databricks (2013). He co-created Apache Mesos, the cluster resource manager that influenced modern container orchestration, and contributed early research on large-scale distributed systems. At Databricks he focused on community and go-to-market, helping establish the open-source strategy that drove Spark and Delta Lake adoption at thousands of enterprises worldwide.

One of the seven Berkeley AMPLab researchers who co-founded Databricks in 2013. At Databricks he has led field engineering and go-to-market functions, translating the company's highly technical distributed-computing platform into enterprise deployments at Fortune 500 companies. His background in translating academic distributed-systems research into commercial products has been central to Databricks' growth from a Berkeley spin-out to a $62B company.