# Ali Ghodsi

Co-founder and CEO, Databricks. TIME100 AI 2026, Leaders. An Iranian-born computer scientist who came to Berkeley as a visiting scholar in 2009, he now runs a company valued at $190 billion. ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Ghodsi))

- Born: 1978, Iran ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Ghodsi))
- 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 ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Ghodsi))
- Career: Databricks (Co-founder and CEO, 2013 to now); UC Berkeley (Adjunct Professor, 2015 to now); KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Assistant Professor, 2008–2009); Peerialism (Co-founder) ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Ghodsi), [databricks.com](https://www.databricks.com/company/leadership-team), [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/in/alighodsi))
- TIME profile: https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/2026/ali-ghodsi/
- Profile: https://www.autumn.ai/resources/most-influential-people-in-ai/ali-ghodsi

- 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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Ghodsi))
- Co-founded Peerialism, a Stockholm startup building peer-to-peer data transfer, and taught at KTH before moving to the US. ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Ghodsi))
- Arrived at UC Berkeley in 2009 as a visiting scholar and helped start the Apache Mesos and Apache Spark projects. ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Ghodsi))
- Co-invented dominant resource fairness, a way of sharing computing resources that shaped scheduling in systems like Hadoop. ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Ghodsi))
- All seven Databricks co-founders started out together in one room at Berkeley's Soda Hall. ([linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/alighodsi_from-soda-hall-to-the-football-field-databricks-activity-7508938998439014400-ejak))
- Led Databricks to a $190 billion valuation in an August 2026 funding round of $5 billion. ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Ghodsi))