Ali Ghodsi
Co-founder and CEO, Databricks
An Iranian-born computer scientist who came to Berkeley as a visiting scholar in 2009, he now runs a company valued at $190 billion.
- Born
- 1978, Iran
- Now
- Co-founder and CEO, Databricks
- Studied
- KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Mid Sweden University
Interesting facts
- Early start
Finished a master's in computer engineering and an MBA in logistics and marketing at the same Swedish university, both in 2002.
en.wikipedia.org - Before AI
Co-founded Peerialism, a Stockholm startup building peer-to-peer data transfer, and taught at KTH before moving to the US.
en.wikipedia.org - Turning point
Arrived at UC Berkeley in 2009 as a visiting scholar and helped start the Apache Mesos and Apache Spark projects.
en.wikipedia.org - First
Co-invented dominant resource fairness, a way of sharing computing resources that shaped scheduling in systems like Hadoop.
en.wikipedia.org - Connection
All seven Databricks co-founders started out together in one room at Berkeley's Soda Hall.
linkedin.com - Numbers
Led Databricks to a $190 billion valuation in an August 2026 funding round of $5 billion.
en.wikipedia.org
Career
- DatabricksCo-founder and CEO2013 to now
- UC BerkeleyAdjunct Professor, EECS2015 to now
- KTH Royal Institute of TechnologyAssistant Professor2008–2009
- PeerialismCo-founder
Education
- PhD, Distributed computing, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, 2006
- MSc, Computer engineering, Mid Sweden University, 2002
- MBA, Logistics and strategic marketing, Mid Sweden University, 2002
