Matei Zaharia's Biography

Matei Zaharia is a Romanian-Canadian computer scientist, entrepreneur, and innovator best known for creating Apache Spark and co-founding Databricks, a leading data and AI company. Born on June 10, 1985, Zaharia developed a passion for computers at a young age, eventually earning his PhD in Computer Science from UC Berkeley. While at Berkeley, he created Apache Spark, a revolutionary open-source unified analytics engine for large-scale data processing, which quickly became one of the most widely used big data platforms in the world. In 2013, Zaharia co-founded Databricks to commercialize Spark and help enterprises harness the power of big data and AI. Today, Databricks is valued at billions of dollars, and Zaharia serves as its Chief Technology Officer while also teaching at Stanford University. Recognized for his groundbreaking contributions, he has received the ACM Prize in Computing and was named an MIT Technology Review Innovator Under 35. Zaharia is passionate about open source, distributed systems, and the ethical implications of AI. As a prominent figure in the tech industry with an estimated net worth of $2 billion, Zaharia continues to inspire innovation and drive the future of data science and artificial intelligence.