Updated October 4, 13:30 BST to add Series I figure.
Databricks has opened a new 29,885-square-foot office in central London.
The company has 400+ staff in the UK, where it has grown over 60% yearly for the past three years, executives said – naming UK customers like GSK, Heathrow, Rolls Royce, Shell, and Virgin Atlantic among others.
San Francisco-headquartered Databricks was founded by the creators of Apache Spark; a data analytics engine. Its “Databricks Intelligence Platform” PaaS is built on its “Lakehouse” architecture and underpinned by Apache Spark, as well as open source projects Delta Lake, MLflow and Unity Catalog.
Samuel Bonamigo, Databricks’s SVP and EMEA general manager, told The Stack that the glossy new offices represented an “opportunity to create not only a culture for the Databricks employees, but also the data and AI community in London” (the Camden-based offices include a large presentation/events space capable of hosting upwards of 100 people.)
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Databricks competes with the likes of Snowflake. It offers a broad suite of tools which critics say have traditionally been engineering-intensive and not always easy to consume, with a fragmented if powerful suite of capabilities increasingly augmented through acquisitions. Since late 2023, however, it has talked about its proposition as centred around a “Databricks Intelligence Platform.”
That’s a one-stop hub for data engineering, data governance, data science, and AI/ML; building on its $1.3 billion Mosaic AI buyout in 2023.
It is delivered as a PaaS on top of a cloud provider. All customer data can be stored on AWS/Azure/GCP with compute provisioned from cloud VMs.
The company raised $1.6 billion in a Series H round in 2021. It followed that with a $500 million Series I in 2023 that valued Databricks at $43 billion. Investors in that round included AWS, Microsoft, and new investors AT&T Ventures and the Qatar Investment Authority.
The company describes its platform as a “unified foundation for all data and governance, combined with AI models tuned to an organisation's unique characteristics” and as a powerful resource for joining up both structured and unstructured data sources and breaking down data silos.
Sitting down with The Stack, Andy Kofoid (President, Global Field Operations) said Databricks was building out its partner strategy in EMEA and beyond. The company, he explained, is a 100% direct sales company rather than using channel partners, but both large systems integrators and boutique partners are a big part of its success story – and it is looking to improve training for them as part of its ongoing growth strategy.
He said: “Building a community around Databricks is very foundational.
“We now offer a Databricks certification to our partners at no charge. We’re trying to make it easy, ubiquitous to learn more about Databricks.
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“From my standpoint from a go-to-market, so much of our GTM is done through partners. We have our own services delivery org. But it’s really our partner ecosystem that is going to drive scale…” Kofoid added.
“Our partners have hundreds of thousands of employees and how we drive accreditation at that scale [is a priority]. As Databricks grows, our ecosystem has to grow with it. If you think about an Accenture, or a Deloitte, they have massive practices around other software vendors like Salesforce or SAP. When they go talk to customers they hear ‘we need help with data’, ‘we need help with AI, can you help us?’
“And what’s the best technology? Databricks. So you better have a list of accredited Databricks practitioners successful at building implementations. [As a result] the SIs globally are investing in a big way in building up their capabilities in Databricks” Kofoid added, saying a C-Suite emphasis on data portability and avoiding vendor lock-in is a major driver towards propositions like its platform that are cloud-agnostic and built on open-source.
