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10 Hot Big Data Companies You Should Watch In 2022
Rick Whiting
Here’s a roundup of 10 companies developing big data technologies and big data solutions to keep an eye on in 2022—some well-known, some likely to break out this year and some just starting to appear on industry observers’ radar screens.
Databricks
Top Executive: Ali Ghodsi, Co-Founder, CEO
Many observers anticipated a 2021 IPO from Databricks. But the high-flying data analytics platform and data lakehouse technology developer instead raised impressive amounts of venture capital, including $1 billion and $1.6 billion in funding rounds in February and August, respectively, that put the company’s market valuation at $38 billion.
(In December the company announced its own venture investment vehicle, Databricks Ventures, to invest in startups developing what the company called “the next generation of innovation and technology harnessing the power of data and AI.”)
Could 2022 be the year Databricks goes public? Following Snowflake’s blockbuster IPO in September 2020, expectations for a Databricks initial public offering will be sky-high.
On the technology side, Databricks has been the most visible proponent of the data lakehouse architecture as an alternative to traditional data warehouse systems. (The Lakehouse Fund, the first Databricks Ventures fund, was launched to invest in early stage companies developing lakehouse-related technology.) While there has been much discussion of the advantages of data lakehouses, developments in 2022 should provide a clearer picture on how widely the lakehouse concept is catching on. In January Databricks launched a data lakehouse system specifically for retailers—the company’s first for a vertical industry.
