Next to him walks Matei Zaharia, the 28 year-old tech celebrity who co-founded and is currently CTO of Databricks. He has been in the news of late for receiving the highly coveted 2026 ACM Prize in Computing. Communities selected for this honor receive a $250,000 cash award. Through the profile, Fortune lauds Zaharia for his landmark contributions to the tech industry, particularly for having created the game-changing open-source project Spark, which reinvented big data processing.
During his PhD at UC Berkeley, Zaharia built Spark with the guidance of one of the world’s top computer science professors, Ion Stoica. His work focused on making cutting edge, complicated big data projects faster, easier and more effective. Today, Spark has grown into the de facto foundational technology of modern data analytics. It’s greatly changed the landscape for how companies use and store their data.
Those innovations have propelled Databricks, the company co-founded by Zaharia, to spectacular financial success. They’ve done it by raising over $20 billion and achieving the stratospheric valuation of $134 billion. The company continues to grow, reporting $5.4 billion in revenue last quarter, proof of its ever-expanding power and influence across the tech landscape.
In a recent TechCrunch event, Zaharia shared his insights on artificial intelligence, stating, “AGI is here already. It’s just not in a form that we appreciate.” He emphasized the transformative potential of artificial intelligence, acknowledging its capabilities while noting that “not that many people need to build applications, but lots of people need to understand information.”
Zaharia’s recognition with the ACM Prize helps to bring attention to the importance of his work. On one hand, it signals incredible things in store for the future of technology. In his acceptance, he thanked the award. At the same time, he announced a plan to donate that $250,000 prize to charity, further establishing his commitment to giving back to the community.
“It’s awesome. You can do so many things with it. It just does them automatically,” Zaharia remarked, expressing his excitement about the ongoing developments in AI technology. His greatest contribution may have been recognizing the totality and complexity of AI. Oh, of course it’s not a little people,” he said, noting the complexities of artificial general intelligence.
In addition to his role at Databricks, Zaharia is an associate professor at UC Berkeley, where he’s helping to shape the next generation of tech innovators. He personally leads innovative conversations within academia and industry. His life and career story is illustrative of the intersection of academia and entrepreneurship that makes him one of today’s most remarkable technological innovators.
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