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in the digital age data is everywhere
we all leave a data footprint wherever
we go online
but with so much data it's sometimes
tricky to get your head around
how it's collected and why it's
collected given the vast quantities of
it
that's where databricks comes in one of
the market leaders when it comes to data
services
but what is the story of data bricks and
how have they reached a 28 billion
dollar valuation
here's how it happened first of all we
have to answer the question what is
databricks
well databricks is a san francisco
headquartered data and ai company
founded by ali godzii in 2013
who was one of the original creators of
apache spark
delta lake and ml flow built on a lake
house
architecture in the cloud which combines
the best elements of data lakes
and data warehouses delivering data
management and performance typically
found in data warehouses with the
low-cost
flexible object stores offered by data
lakes
they might seem like a boring business
that deals with data
and they even suggest they handle the
boring ai needs for their clients
but they're trusted by over 5 000
businesses around the world
some of which are huge institutions like
shell
hsbc t-mobile microsoft and amazon among
others
who rely on data bricks to help with
data engineering
science machine learning and analytics
to help data teams solve incredibly
difficult problems
essentially databricks helps clients
store clean
and visualize vast amounts of data from
disparate sources
some examples include finance firms
analyzing satellite data to understand
where to invest money
or shell even use data bricks to monitor
sensor data from
200 million valves to predict ahead of
time
if any will break there are limitless
uses for the software
the business was started in 2013 by the
team of engineers who launched apache
spark from the university of california
berkeley alongside one of the computer
science professors there
dave patterson apache spark is described
as a lightning fast
unified analytics engine for big data
and machine learning
and it has quickly become the largest
open source community in big data
with over a thousand contributors from
250 organizations
it's 100 open source hosted at the
vendor independent apache software
foundation
apache spark therefore laid the
foundation upon which databricks was
built
when they first set up godzi and the
team estimated they might be able to
sell their business one day for a few
hundred million dollars
far underestimating themselves they were
also often told that their idea wouldn't
take off
because people believed that the cloud
wouldn't work that you'd need an
on-prem or on-premise solution with some
companies investing billions into data
centers
but their bold stand which included
turning down 20 million dollars to build
an on-prem
version of their software has seen the
company rise to become
a giant today they make their money
through a model they call software as a
service open source
they offer a free open source version of
databricks but their software as a
service offering has more features that
would interest business clients like
reliability
scalability and availability with
everything being on the cloud
whilst their free version saw them grow
like a b2c company
databricks really needed to target
business customers who were more
reluctant when it came to paying for the
service
why pay when you can get something great
for free so they had to take a step back
and think what can we remove from the
free version that keeps it functional
and useful and what can we include in
our paid version
to make it good enough that people won't
mind paying for it and
customers have now been paying for it
freely so much so that data breaks have
surpassed
annual recurring revenues of 425 million
dollars which has attracted a lot of
attention from investors
and have raised over 1 billion dollars
in hard cash
which values the business at over 28
billion dollars with investments from
franklin templeton
fidelity cppib blackrock
alphabet and t rowe price among others
after an oversubscribed funding round
gotzi suggested that he's always left
some valuation on the table after each
funding round because
it's a long term game after all the goal
for the business
isn't just to get to ipo but to be
around for a long time
in a gigantic market in which they've
only just scratched the surface
the team is so ambitious that sometimes
they're keen to abandon yesterday's work
because today's innovative idea might be
even more successful
it's seen them partner closely with
microsoft which helps the tech giant
pass
lots of data quickly and databricks are
now an industry leader when it comes to
cloud-based data engineering and yet few
people have heard of them
perhaps with ipo fever around the corner
the public will soon know
who databricks are and understand the
importance of businesses like databricks
especially as technology continues to
improve
and that's how it happened thanks for
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