Ali Ghodsi
Co-founder and CEO of Databricks
The co-founder and CEO of Databricks, who helped start Apache Spark and Mesos and runs one of the largest data and AI platforms.
Biography
Ali Ghodsi is an Iranian-Swedish-American computer scientist and entrepreneur specializing in distributed systems, big data and data management. He earned an MSc in computer engineering and an MBA from Mid-Sweden University in 2002 and a PhD in distributed computing from KTH Royal Institute of Technology in 2006, advised by Seif Haridi.
He joined UC Berkeley in 2009 as a visiting scholar, where he helped start the Apache Mesos and Apache Spark projects and co-invented dominant resource fairness, a concept that influenced resource scheduling in systems such as Hadoop. In 2013 he co-founded Databricks, which commercializes Spark, and he became chief executive in 2016. In August 2026 he led Databricks through a $5 billion funding round led by Coatue Management at a $190 billion valuation, and TIME named him to its 2026 list of the most influential people in AI. He is also an adjunct professor at UC Berkeley.
Notable contributions
Helped start Apache Spark and Apache Mesos
While at UC Berkeley, helped start the Mesos and Spark projects, which became widely used open-source systems for cluster resource management and large-scale data processing.
Co-founded Databricks
Co-founded the cloud data analytics and AI company Databricks in 2013 and became its chief executive in 2016.
Led Databricks to a $190 billion valuation
Led a $5 billion funding round in August 2026, led by Coatue Management, valuing Databricks at $190 billion.