What does Databricks do?

The TL;DR

Databricks sells a data science and analytics platform – i.e. a place to query and share data – built on top of an open source package called Apache Spark. 

• Apache Spark is an open source engine for running analytics and machine learning across distributed, giant datasets

• Spark is notoriously hard to run on your own infrastructure and companies often don’t have the expertise to do that

• Databricks provides a managed service for running Spark clusters, as well as notebooks for visualization and exploration, plus the ability to schedule pipelines

• More recently, Databricks has been expanding the product portfolio to include ML and data warehousing

This is a pretty big company, all things considered - $28B was their most recent valuation, making it one of the most valuable private companies on the planet. And they’re planning on going public in 2021.