#834

Matei Zaharia

Romania 41 years old Self-Made

Overview

Source of Wealth
Data analytics
Industry
Technology
Residence
Berkeley, California
Education
University of California, Berkeley (Ph.D)
University of Waterloo (Bachelor of Science)

Biography

Matei Zaharia is cofounder and chief technology officer of software startup Databricks, which private investors valued at $134 billion in February.

He is the mastermind behind popular analytics engine Apache Spark, which was conceived when he was a 24-year-old Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley.

Spark set a world record for speed of data sorting in 2014 and won Zaharia an award for the year's best computer science dissertation.

In 2013, Zaharia and six UC Berkeley collaborators cofounded Databricks, whose software is built on top of Spark.

He has led development on multiple new, AI-powered features beyond Spark.