creators

Ali Ghodsi — Databricks co-founder and CEO

Ali Ghodsi co-founded Databricks in 2013 and has been its CEO since January 2016. A KTH PhD in distributed computing, he is an adjunct professor at UC Berkeley.

Ali Ghodsi is an Iranian-born Swedish-American computer scientist and entrepreneur, co-founder and chief executive of Databricks. He took an MBA at Mid-Sweden University in 2003 and a PhD in distributed computing at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden in 2006, advised by Seif Haridi. He joined UC Berkeley in 2009 as a visiting scholar, working with Scott Shenker, Ion Stoica, Michael Franklin and Matei Zaharia on distributed systems. He helped launch Apache Mesos and Apache Spark, and co-invented Dominant Resource Fairness, a way of allocating several resource types at once in a cluster, presented at USENIX NSDI in 2011. He is still an adjunct professor at Berkeley. Ghodsi co-founded Databricks in 2013 with six other Berkeley researchers to commercialise Spark, and moved from VP of engineering and product management to CEO in January 2016. In August 2026 the company said it had closed $5 billion in strategic funding at a $190 billion valuation, past a $7 billion revenue run-rate and growing more than 80% year over year. TIME put him on its 2026 TIME100 AI list.

Specialization

distributed systems, data infrastructure, Apache Spark, enterprise AI platforms

Country

United States