Company · Software · Artificial Intelligence · founded 2013
Databricks
San Francisco data and AI platform company built around Apache Spark, which grew out of UC Berkeley's AMPLab. Ali Ghodsi is a co-founder and its CEO.
Of the 3 people here linked to Databricks, 3 are founders and 3 are still there. These are people who succeeded, not the odds of succeeding.
Description and founding year: databricks.com. Each person's role links to its own source on their profile.
3 people at Databricks
Founder Still there
Role
Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, 2013–now
Source
· high confidence. Forbes lists him as cofounder and CEO on October 19, 2026. He joined as a part-time engineer and became CEO in 2016, per Forbes and Wikipedia.
Software · Artificial Intelligence · Technology 3 / 3
Ali Ghodsi
Co-founder and CEO, Databricks; computer scientist who helped start Apache Spark and Mesos at UC Berkeley
class not established · well-connected · graduate degree
Founder Still there
Role
Co-founder and CTO, 2013–now
Source
· high confidence. His Berkeley page lists him as Databricks co-founder and CTO; Forbes (Oct 22, 2026) also calls him cofounder and CTO.
Software · Artificial Intelligence · Technology 3 / 2
Matei Zaharia
Creator of Apache Spark; co-founder and CTO of Databricks; Berkeley computer science professor
class not established · well-connected · graduate degree