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The data and AI platform built on Apache Spark.

Seven researchers took an open-source project out of a Berkeley lab and built the company that much of the world’s data infrastructure now runs on.

2013founded out of Berkeley’s AMPLab
7co-founders
Sparkthe open-source engine underneath

How it started: Arsalan Tavakoli-Shiraji

  • Arsalan Tavakoli-ShirajiUVA, computer science & economics · co-founder

Arsalan Tavakoli-Shiraji read computer science and economics here before a doctorate at Berkeley, where he joined the AMPLab — the group that had built Apache Spark, an engine that made large-scale data processing dramatically faster than what came before.

In 2013 seven of them left to commercialize it. The bet was that the hard part was not the engine but everything around it: getting data teams, analysts and eventually machine-learning teams to work on the same data without copying it into three different systems.

How it changed the world

Spark and the platform built on it are now standard infrastructure for analytics and machine learning at a very large share of the world’s enterprises. The category Databricks argued for — one governed place where analytics and AI run over the same data — became the way the industry organizes itself.

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