TIME100 AI 2026 · Shapers
Andy Konwinski
Co-founder, Laude, Databricks, and Perplexity
Started at a trade school and a community college, then co-founded both Databricks and Perplexity.
- Born
- 1983-10-15, Rural Wisconsin, U.S.
- Now
- Co-founder and General Partner, Laude Ventures
- Studied
- UC Berkeley, University of Wisconsin–Madison, University of Wisconsin–Fox Valley
Interesting facts
- Detour
Went to a trade school and a community college before transferring to UW-Madison and then a Berkeley PhD.
en.wikipedia.org - Connection
As a Berkeley grad student he co-created Mesos and was on the team that built Apache Spark, the basis of Databricks.
andykonwinski.com - First
One of very few people to co-found two AI-era giants: Databricks in 2013 and Perplexity in 2022, where he was founding President.
forbes.com - Numbers
Put $100 million of his own money into the Laude Institute, a nonprofit funding moonshot computer science research.
forbes.com - Side project
Runs the K Prize, a $1M contest for the first AI to score 90% on a contamination-free version of SWE-Bench.
andykonwinski.com
Career
- Laude VenturesCo-founder and General Partner2024 to now
- Laude InstituteCo-founder2024 to now
- PerplexityCo-founder and founding President2022 to now
- Computer Science Graduate Ventures2019 to now
- DatabricksCo-founder; VP Product AI/ML2013 to now
Education
- PhD, Computer science, UC Berkeley, 2012
- BS, Computer science, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 2007
- Associate's, Computer science, University of Wisconsin–Fox Valley, 2005
