creators

Ion Stoica - Databricks, Anyscale and Arena Co-Founder

Ion Stoica is a UC Berkeley professor who directs the Sky Computing Lab and co-founded Conviva, Databricks, Anyscale and the model-evaluation company Arena.

Ion Stoica is a Romanian-American computer scientist, a professor in EECS at the University of California, Berkeley, where he holds the Tony Xu and Patti Bao Chancellor's Chair in Computer Science and directs the Sky Computing Lab. His PhD in electrical and computer engineering is from Carnegie Mellon (2000), after an MS at Polytechnic University Bucharest. He co-founded Conviva in 2006, Databricks in 2013 with the other creators of Apache Spark, and Anyscale in 2019 to commercialise Ray, the distributed-computing framework built there. He was Databricks' first chief executive, handing to Ali Ghodsi in 2016, and is now its executive chairman; he holds the same title at Anyscale, which agreed in July 2026 to be bought by Nscale in a deal expected to close this year. He is also co-founder and chairman of Arena, the model-evaluation company that began at Berkeley as Chatbot Arena, became LMArena and is now Arena; it has raised $250 million. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2024, is an ACM Fellow and an honorary member of the Romanian Academy, and received the 2019 SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award.

Specialization

distributed systems, cloud computing, AI infrastructure, model evaluation

Country

United States