Ali Ghodsi is Co-Founder and CEO of Databricks, a data and AI platform company valued at $134 billion. He is also an adjunct professor at UC Berkeley, specializing in distributed systems and big data.

Ali earned his PhD in Distributed Computing from KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden in 2006 and his MBA from Mid-Sweden University. He co-founded Peerialism AB in 2006, which was later acquired, and worked as a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley's AMPLab.

Ali was one of the original creators of Apache Spark and co-authored influential papers on Apache Mesos and Spark SQL. His research in resource management and data caching has been applied to major open-source projects.

Databricks has raised over $19 billion in funding and serves more than 10,000 organizations including over 60% of the Fortune 500. The company crossed $4.8 billion in revenue run-rate in Q3 2025, growing over 55% year-over-year.

Under Ali's leadership since becoming CEO in 2016, Databricks pioneered the lakehouse architecture and achieved positive free cash flow. The company's AI products alone generate over $1 billion in annual revenue run-rate and power data intelligence for enterprises worldwide.