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.