His startup is now worth $62 billion. It gave away its first product for free.
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. When he was in college in Sweden, Ali Ghodsi read an article about a chief executive who was hired to save a struggling tech company. It reminded him of the surgeries his parents, both doctors, performed while he was growing up.
“I loved the fact that you could think about large corporations as patients, and you could perform surgery on them to make them super healthy and successful," he said. Ghodsi is now CEO of a software company called Databricks, which has quietly become one of the fastest-growing startups in Silicon Valley. The 11-year-old company is now valued at $62 billion after securing $10 billion from investors including Andreessen Horowitz and Thrive Capital.
The new funding, announced Tuesday, is among the largest in the history of venture capital. Ghodsi has gotten Databricks to this point thanks to the “strategic surgeries" he said he’s performed to keep the company healthy. After taking the reins in 2016, he grew sales by charging more for software that the company had originally given away for free.
Two years ago, when investors demanded efficiency, he slowed hiring and had his engineers build an AI bot called R2-D2 to boost productivity. Today, data scientists at some of America’s largest companies use Databricks’ software to analyze the large volumes of information they collect—a tool that’s become even more valuable with the rise of artificial intelligence. Walgreens, for example, uses Databricks to help forecast inventory for filling prescriptions, while Rivian uses it to improve the battery life of its electric trucks.
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