Databricks expands global presence with investment in Japan

Tokyo, Japan - September 11, 2020: Databricks, the Data and AI company, today announced the expansion of its global operations to serve the Japanese market. Kenny Takeuchi, a cloud industry veteran, will serve as the company’s country manager. Takeuchi brings 15 years of experience in the industry, most recently serving as executive officer of the Commerce Cloud Business Division at Salesforce.com.

The investment comes less than two years after Databricks established its Asia Pacific-Japan (APJ) presence in Singapore and Australia, and less than six months after announcing leadership additions like Ed Lenta, Senior Vice President and General Manager for Asia-Pacific and Japan (APJ) and industry veteran, Greg Taylor, Regional Vice President of Australia and Southeast Asia. Databricks plans to more than double their presence in Japan over the next 12 months.

This expansion into the Japanese market builds on the momentum Databricks has experienced in the region, helping customers like SoftBank Corp., Nikkei and Grab. SoftBank Corp., which has over 46 million mobile subscribers in Japan, uses Databricks to build their central data platform to generate data-driven insights to support their teams in physical stores, call centers, and back offices. And Nikkei, which owns Financial Time Group and the biggest economic newspaper in Japan, uses Databricks for AI-powered article recommendation for their new app “Nikkei Wave”. Also Grab, the largest online to offline platform in Southeast Asia, uses Databricks’ unified data analytics platform to enable highly personalized customer experiences to improve in-app experiences for millions of users everyday.

Databricks’ investment in the region is well timed with the Japanese government’s aggressive strategy to drive productivity and adoption of AI technology, driven by a cloud-first model. In 2018 the Japanese government set forth an ambitious goal to have 1,600 local government entities using the public cloud by 2023, expecting to see rapid adoption across all verticals.

“This strategic investment in the Japanese market is an opportunity to help data teams innovate faster across every segment, in every industry,” said Ron Gabrisko, chief revenue officer at Databricks. “It also comes on the heels of impressive momentum we’ve built across Asia Pacific and Japan over the past few years with the opening of our offices and hiring of key executives to lead the markets. The demand for our open, cloud-based platform continues to grow as companies accelerate their digital transformations. Kenny Takeuchi brings the right experience and expertise to drive rapid growth.”

Kenny Takeuchi joins the Databricks team, building on an impressive career in enterprise technology. After managing the alliance and enterprise sales team at Adobe, he served as executive officer of the Commerce Cloud Business Division at Salesforce.com in 2017 where he covered both Japan and Korea.

Databricks raised $400 million and was valued $6.2 billion back in October 2019. Before that, the company closed a $250 million funding round in February 2019, a raise that came shortly before Databricks’ revenue run-rate reached $200 million (during Q3 2019). This investment also  comes after the annual recurring revenue grew 2.5 times year over year in 2018. Databricks was founded by the original creators of popular open-source software initiatives including Apache Spark™, Delta Lake and MLflow.

About Databricks

Databricks is the data and AI company. Thousands of organizations worldwide — including Comcast, Condé Nast, Nationwide and H&M — rely on Databricks’ open and unified platform for data engineering, machine learning and analytics. Databricks is venture-backed and headquartered in San Francisco, with offices around the globe. Founded by the original creators of Apache Spark™, Delta Lake and MLflow, Databricks is on a mission to help data teams solve the world’s toughest problems. To learn more, follow Databricks on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. 

Press Contact:
Keyana Corliss
Head of Global Communications
[email protected]