Andy Konwinski

Andy Konwinski is co-founder of Databricks, Perplexity, and Laude Ventures. He earned his PhD at UC Berkeley advised by Randy Katz and helped develop Apache Spark, the open-source data processing engine that became the foundation of Databricks. Databricks has since reached a $62 billion valuation and Perplexity hit a $14 billion valuation in 2025. In June 2025 he pledged $100 million of his own capital to launch the Laude Institute, a new AI research institute expected to open in 2027, led alongside Ion Stoica and Matei Zaharia.