Databricks Announces Record Growth in Japan Fueled by Enterprise AI Boom

Experienced over 100% year-over-year business growth and more than doubled its customers and partners locally

Tokyo, Japan, May 22, 2024 - Databricks, the Data and AI company, today announced it has experienced over 100% year-over-year growth for its Japan business over the last fiscal year, driven by a surge in demand for data and AI capabilities across Japanese enterprises.

Globally, Databricks reached over US$1.6 billion in revenue for its fiscal year ending January 31, representing over 50% year-over-year growth, driven by rapid product innovation. This past fiscal year, Databricks also experienced significant growth in new Japanese customers, including AEON, All Nippon Airways (ANA), Bridgestone, Cosmo Energy Holdings, Konica Minolta, Net One Systems, and Renesas Electronics Corporation, which have adopted the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform to optimize business operations, drive innovation, and enhance decision-making. 

“Japan is one of our fastest-growing markets and we’re pleased that so many leading enterprises have chosen Databricks to support their data and AI transformation. We look forward to working with even more Japanese customers to build with AI that’s trained on their own data using our Data Intelligence Platform,” said Ed Lenta, Senior Vice President and General Manager of APJ at Databricks.

“Our legacy data infrastructure was complicated, having several vendors for different needs, such as Snowflake for data warehousing and Airflow for job management. As the amount of data and the number of users increased, this also increased IT costs. By migrating to the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, we now have a simple and seamless data analysis environment for users to accomplish various tasks including BI and AI on all data, unified governance to easily monitor and manage security logs, while also significantly reducing the total cost of ownership. We are also excited to develop AI assistants using LLMs on Databricks and explore secure data sharing with third parties to create new business opportunities,” said Motoi Ohtake, Tech Lead at ICW Business Expansion Division, Konica Minolta.

Databricks recently launched DBRX, a general-purpose large language model (LLM), built entirely on top of Databricks, so every enterprise can use the same tools and techniques to create and improve their own high-quality models. 

“I'm excited about the huge potential and interest we're seeing in the market right now and we're thrilled to be the first to offer multicloud LLM training solutions in Japan starting next month. Databricks Mosaic AI Training is an important solution for Japanese enterprises as we are able to provide customers with more choices and control to train and finetune their own AI models on their private data securely. Building custom LLMs trained on specific and private enterprise data can help Japanese businesses tailor their AI models to the context of their business and domain, significantly improving the quality of their generative AI applications,” said Toshifumi Sasa, Vice President and Country Manager for Databricks Japan. 

Databricks has also more than doubled the number of partners in its partner ecosystem in the last fiscal year, forming strategic alliances with new key partners locally, including Mitsui Knowledge Industry, NS Solutions, and Macnica, adding to its existing partners such as NTT Data, Accenture and Deloitte Tohmatsu Consulting. 

“Databricks is the perfect data platform for realizing our goal of being a Social Value Producer. Databricks introduced the concept of the data lakehouse to revolutionize the way data is utilized and is now integrating generative AI technology to further evolve into a data intelligence platform. NS Solutions has a long history of building data infrastructure and applying AI to business operations to deliver value to our clients. We are confident that Databricks' integrated and advanced capabilities will enable us to deliver the value of our rich AI use cases and practical data governance experience to customers in an even greater and more seamless way. Leveraging our mutual strengths, Databricks and NS Solutions are committed to working with customers to solve social problems and create new value,” said Kazuhiko Tamaoki, Representative Director & President of NS Solutions Corporation.

About Databricks
Databricks is the Data and AI company. More than 10,000 organisations worldwide — including Comcast, Condé Nast, Grammarly, and over 60% of the Fortune 500 — rely on the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform to unify and democratise data, analytics and AI. Databricks is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices around the globe and was founded by the original creators of Lakehouse, Apache Spark™, Delta Lake and MLflow. To learn more, follow Databricks on LinkedIn, X and Facebook.