We're doubling India investments in R&D teams, go-to-market strategies: Databricks' Anil Bhasin

Artificial intelligence company and the maker of open-source large language model Dolly, Databricks, today announced the launch and availability of Databricks infrastructure on Google Cloud’s India (Mumbai) region to support the growing customer base. The California-headquartered company also said that it has registered 80% annualised growth in the last two years for India region, driven by the demand for AI capabilities across Indian enterprises.

Databricks was founded in 2013 by the inventors of open source distribution framework Apache Spark. However, in India the company established a base only three years back. Today Databricks India has offices in Delhi, Mumbai, and Bengaluru, along with smaller establishments in Chennai and Pune. The Bengaluru research and development hub was established last year. The company’s clientele includes Air India, Aditya Birla Fashion and Retail Ltd., CommerceIQ, Freshworks, InMobi, Meesho, Myntra, Parle, and UPL. Notably, Ola’s AI company Krutrim that launched its LLM model by the same name in beta phase last month, is also working with Databricks’ team to pre-train and fine-tune its model.

“India is what we call tier-I focus country for Databricks. This basically means that we have a huge focus and investments in terms of people, infrastructure, and everything else from a go-to market standpoint,” Anil Bhasin, Databricks India country manager told TechCircle. “We have kept our promise of growing our employee base by 50% this year to 400 employees.”

Databricks has also announced that it is doubling investments in India with the launch on Google Cloud and expansion of go-to-market and R&D teams. “In the last 18-24 months we have put a lot of muscle power by investing in people and building go-to-market capabilities. We are building local expertise so that our customers in India do not have any dependency outside. We are self-sufficient in terms of making sure customers see value in engaging with databricks as a strategic partner,” said Bhasin.

Databricks, which calls itself the pioneer of data lakehouse, has also taken plunge into generative AI with launch of tools like Dolly. “We have now combined these two technologies to come up with data intelligence platform,” said Bhasin. In the last few months, Databricks has made several acquisitions including Arcion and Lilac. One of the most significant acquisitions however has been that of MosaicML, touted as the OpenAI competitor, for $1.3 billion. “MosaicML provides a unified tooling for building AI solutions. The focus to move to building LLMs from just predictive models. With MosaicML’s acquisition, we are very proud that we have focused on trying to be as open source as possible,” he said. Bhasin, however, did not comment when asked about plans for potential acquisitions in Indian AI landscape.