How Seven Academics Who Didn’t Want To Make A Cent Became Accidental Billionaires

Databricks’ cutting-edge software uses artificial intelligence to fuse costly data warehouses (structured data used for analytics) with data lakes (cheap, raw data repositories) to create what it has coined data “lakehouses” (no space between the words, in the finest geekspeak tradition). Users feed in their data and the AI makes predictions about the future. John Deere, for example, installs sensors in its farm equipment to measure things like engine temperature and hours of use. Databricks uses this raw data to predict when a tractor is likely to break down. E-commerce companies use the software to suggest changes to their websites that boost sales. It’s used to detect malicious actors—both on stock exchanges and on social networks.