Databricks on Mission to Build First Enterprise AI Platform

Ali Ghodsi might have one of the best jobs in technology right now. As the CEO of Databricks, Ghodsi just completed an oversubscribed $400 million round of funding that gave the company a $6.2 billion valuation. Better still, Ghodsi never once had to break out the pitch stick. “It was the easiest fund raise I’ve ever done,” he said. It’s all good, but Ghodsi continues to chase the ultimate goal: Building the industry’s first enterprise AI platform.When Databricks emerged on the scene back in 2013, some people assumed it would follow in the footsteps of other commercial open source vendors making waves at the time. After all, Databricks was founded by the people behind Apache Spark, including Matei Zaharia, who created Spark while studying at UC Berkeley’s AMPLab under Ghodsi, as well as other folks associated with the AMPLab or Berkeley’s computer science department, such as Ion Stoica, Reynold Xin, Andy Konwinski, and Arsalan Tavakoli-Shiraji.If Spark was the Next Big Thing to come after Hadoop, as it certainly was and continues to be, then it seemed to follow that Databricks would find some way to monetize Spark in a similar manner. Databricks would be to Spark what Cloudera is to Hadoop or what MongoDB is to NoSQL databases. But that’s not how the story played out. Instead of riding Spark as a one-trick pony, Databricks has gone in a different direction. While Spark plays a part in the company’s plan, it’s just one element of an increasingly diverse set of software as a service (SaaS) offerings that Databricks operates on behalf of its customers across all the major public cloud platforms.