Databricks, the Data and AI company, has announced the expansion of its global operations to serve the Korean market.
To further support Databricks’ growing team and local customer base, the company also confirmed it recently opened a new office space in Seoul, Korea earlier this year. Jia Woei Ling, a cloud industry veteran, who joined Databricks last year as the Managing Director of North Asia, will lead strategic GTM functions in the region.
Jia Woei brings two decades of experience in the industry to Databricks North Asia, most recently serving in leadership positions at both Microsoft and AWS. Ed Lenta, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Databricks Asia Pacific said:
“As one of the largest markets in the Asia Pacific region, Korea is a natural expansion for us and a reflection of growing demand from businesses looking to adopt an open, modern lakehouse architecture and accelerate their cloud data strategy. We look forward to working closely with partners and customers in Korea to fuel digital transformation with data and AI.”
Building momentum
Databricks has raised nearly $3.6 billion, and was valued at $38 billion, after the company’s Series H funding last year, which included investments from cloud leaders and strategic partners Amazon Web Services (AWS), CapitalG and Microsoft. The expansion builds on the momentum and demand Databricks has experienced in the region, working with data-driven customers like Bagelcode and the global fandom platform, Weverse Company.
Weverse is leveraging the Databricks Lakehouse Platform on AWS to provide a single, reliable source of truth for all of their data, and enable their data engineers, data scientists, and analysts to seamlessly collaborate. With Databricks, Weverse can now easily gain user insights by collecting and analyzing large amounts of consumer data from various sources, such as backend server logs, client app logs and marketing solutions, the company said.
The company previously reported to Bloomberg that it ended Fiscal Year 2022 with $800 million in ARR, an 80 per cent jump over the previous year. Databricks was founded by the original creators of popular open-source software initiatives including Apache Spark, Delta Lake and MLflow.
Databricks has pioneered a simple and open architecture for data and AI, which brings the reliability, governance, and performance of a data warehouse directly to the data lakes that most organizations already store their data in. Databricks customers are building lakehouse platforms on AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud to support every data and analytics use case – from data warehousing and business intelligence (BI), to data engineering and AI/ML workloads – in a single, unified location.
Local Databricks partners like Cloocus and Megazone play an integral role in bringing the vision of the Lakehouse Platform to life for customers in Korea. Cloocus CEO Steve Hong said, “With the official expansion of Databricks in Korea, Cloocus will continue to build a valuable partnership with Databricks Korea. We aim to leverage our proven expertise in digital acceleration for clients across various industries with the Databricks Lakehouse platform, a powerful solution that helps customers drive value using data & AI.”
MegazoneCloud CEO, Willy Cho said: “Through this official launch in Korea, we will focus on strengthening the expertise of the data business so that many corporate customers of MegazoneCloud can successfully obtain and operate their business insights through the Databricks platform.”
