A Shared Vision for Data Teams: Why Cubonacci Joined Databricks

Today, we are excited to announce that our company, Cubonacci, has joined the Databricks family. We founded Cubonacci in Amsterdam to enable businesses to build scalable and future-proof data science solutions. Our goal was to bring machine learning to the masses and we are excited to continue this mission through Databricks’ vision and strategy. More specifically: Jan van der Vegt, Sr. Product Manager, will be supporting the foundational layer of machine learning: scalable and secure data storage. Borre Mosch, Sr. Software Developer, will be focusing on jobs and workflows.

One question we keep hearing is: Why leave the entrepreneurial world for Databricks? In reality, it is our entrepreneurial drive that led us here. The company is growing at a nearly-unheard speed and helping pave the future of data and AI. This move seems even more obvious when we look at how Databricks is making AI/ML more accessible and transforming how enterprises interact with and leverage their data.

In other words, there is no one reason why we joined Databricks. There are countless, but we broke down a few of the reasons we think it’s a perfect fit:

Culture of innovation (and ability to execute)

Every enterprise, every industry will need to adopt a data and AI strategy to stay ahead among an ever-growing amount of data. Data teams are the force behind the innovations that are changing how we live and solving some of the world’s toughest problems. The Databricks Lakehouse Platform transforms how data teams use all of their data for all of their data, analytics and AI workloads without the need to rely on clunky, multi-vendor solutions.

At Cubonacci, we shared this vision of empowering data teams (more specifically for us, data scientists) to shape the future of enterprise with solutions built to do just that. Operating in a competitive and risk-averse market made it difficult to grow as fast as we needed to. Joining Databricks– which has a strong history of introducing cutting-edge solutions to the market - allows us to tap into our strengths and bring innovations to life. We’re very excited to bring our own experience from the startup world into the exceptional product and engineering teams that make this happen.

Customer-first mindset and the adoption to back it up

One of Databricks’ core values is “be customer-obsessed,” which in essence means the company makes decisions based on customer and partner needs above all else. This aligns with our own philosophy as founders since we know every customer matters. Being able to bring this customer obsession and apply this at the scale of Databricks is very exciting. With many fast-growing companies, it can be hard to distinguish innovative technology from just great marketing. But to date, over 5,000 companies across the globe rely on Databricks to unlock value from their data, with many driving novel AI/ML and analytics use cases to tackle tough challenges.

Open source is an essential component of the technology world and something that we highly value as tech founders. Something that sets Databricks apart is its commitment to the community as a whole. The company is rooted in open source and has built 5 major open source projects thus far – Apache Spark^TM, Delta Lake, MLflow and Koalas. Delta Sharing, the fifth project, was just announced last month and is a total game-changer. Delta Sharing is the industry's first open protocol for secure data sharing, making it simple to share data with other organizations regardless of which computing platform they use.

World-class talent across the map

Databricks is in a unique position in that its very foundations are in academia This “researcher” mindset has transpired into a corporate culture that is data-driven, analytical and unafraid to question the status quo. And with development happening so fast, there’s room for us to bring our entrepreneurial spirit and make a huge impact on the product roadmap.

The opportunity to learn from the global team is one of the most appealing aspects of joining Databricks. We’re excited to work out of the Amsterdam HQ, which is the second-largest engineering office at Databricks. This team is rapidly growing and operates under the leadership of former innovators from Google, Facebook, Amazon and more.

This is a new chapter for us. Building a company from scratch taught us a lot, and we’re excited to apply these lessons to Databricks. We’re also growing our team in Amsterdam. Interested in joining us? Check out our current openings!