Databricks

Databricks was founded in 2013 by the original creators of Apache Spark, including Ali Ghodsi, Matei Zaharia, and Ion Stoica. Headquartered in San Francisco, the company is privately held, last valued at $43 billion during a 2023 Series I funding round. The core product is a data analytics and AI platform. Databricks established its R&D presence in Israel in 2020 through the acquisition of the Tel Aviv-based startup Redash.

The company develops a platform that combines data engineering, data science, and data warehousing on a single architecture, which it terms a "Lakehouse." The stack relies heavily on open-source projects created or maintained by the founders and employees, specifically Apache Spark, Delta Lake, and MLflow. The software runs as a managed service on public clouds, notably AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure (where it is sold as a first-party service called Azure Databricks). It bills customers based on compute consumption.

Databricks competes directly with Snowflake in the enterprise data platform market. While Snowflake originated as a cloud data warehouse and expanded into data science, Databricks started in data engineering and machine learning before expanding into warehousing with Databricks SQL. The company aggressively expanded into generative AI over the past two years, acquiring MosaicML in 2023 for $1.3 billion to enable enterprises to train custom language models, and acquiring Tabular in 2024 to expand its data management capabilities.

The Israeli R&D center focuses heavily on Databricks SQL and data visualization, building directly on the IP and team from the Redash acquisition. Arik Fraimovich, Redash's founder, joined Databricks as a Director of Engineering to integrate the visualization technology into the broader Databricks SQL product. The local team primarily hires software engineers for backend, frontend, and product roles related to data analytics interfaces.