Databricks, a unified analytics provider founded by the original creators of Apache Spark, has opened new offices in Sydney, Australia; Tokyo, Japan and Bangalore, India as the next step in the company’s strategy to help businesses in the Asia-Pacific and Japan (APJ) region overcome challenges slowing artificial intelligence (AI) adoption.
The US-based company, which established APJ headquarters in Singapore in December 2018, is now valued at US$2.75 billion following a recent US$250 million series E funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from Coatue Management, Microsoft, New Enterprise Associates (NEA), and others.
The company is now engaging customers in more than 12 markets across the APJ region, including Australia’s government-owned health service, Healthdirect; Indonesian travel giant Traveloka, Indian entertainment network Viacom 18, Japanese online entertainment channel Every.TV as well as Samsung Electronics.
“There’s a healthy appetite for unified analytics in APJ from businesses keen to get ahead in the AI race,” said Jason Bissel, MD and VP for Databricks, Asia-Pacific. Unified analytics allows enterprises to join up the dots between data
processing and machine learning in order to accelerate innovation.
“AI has far reaching implications for businesses across a wide range of sectors, from healthcare to fintech and entertainment, and this has not gone unnoticed by businesses in the region. Our Singapore HQ and new Japan, Australia and India offices will be instrumental in meeting this demand, and this is just the beginning,” Bissel said.
The AI market in Asia-Pacific is projected to grow from US$6 billion in 2017 to US$136 billion by 2025. The stumbling block for many enterprises however is their inability to harness vast streams of reliable data and retrieve meaningful insights.
Databricks also announced a collaboration with AI Singapore (AISG), a national AI programme tasked with boosting Singapore’s AI capabilities.
“The potential for AI in Singapore is undeniably huge; however for AI to be fully realised, we still need to address the issues of talent development, recruitment and deployment. Today, AISG has the 100 Experiments (100E) and AI Apprenticeship programmes to meet the first two needs.
"For deployment, the Apache Spark and Databricks platform is something my team have been working on for many years, and Databricks’ Unified Analytics is a production-grade platform which many of our 100E projects will run on. Bridging the divide between big data and machine learning needs to happen for AI initiatives to be successful, and this is where Databricks’ Unified Analytics comes in,” said Laurence Liew, Director of AI Industry Innovation, AISG.
Databricks’ Unified Analytics Platform makes it easier for enterprises to build data pipelines across various siloed data storage systems and to prepare labelled datasets for model building - allowing organisations to perform data science on massive data sets. The single collaborative platform also eliminates the challenges of data silos and the gap between data processing and machine learning platforms, while improving communication between data scientists and engineering teams.
“Our mission as Singapore’s national AI programme is to catalyse, synergise and boost Singapore’s AI capabilities to power our future digital economy. We hope that we can make this happen through our partnership with Databricks and we look forward to the collaboration to help Singapore’s businesses reap the full rewards of AI,” commented Liew.
Databricks’ mission is to accelerate innovation for its customers by unifying data science, engineering and business. Users achieve faster time-to-value with Databricks by creating analytic workflows that go from extract, transform load (ETL) and interactive exploration to production. The company also makes it easier for its users to focus on their data by providing a fully managed, scalable, and secure cloud infrastructure that reduces operational complexity and total cost of ownership.
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