India is among Databricks’ most important markets by both growth and revenue, and the company is stepping up its investments in the country, according to Arsalan Tavakoli, cofounder and senior vice president of field engineering.
The push is being driven by a thriving digital-native ecosystem, growing enterprise adoption of artificial intelligence and a shift by multinational companies to India-based development centres to tap the country’s talent pool, he said.
“There is the evolution I have seen on the India side. Historically, people would talk about India much more as large kind of the TCS and Wipros of the world doing development,” Tavakoli said.
In recent years, however, large organisations have increasingly shifted workloads to India in search of talent.
“We have a large team of technical resources in India, to support the India-based resources of organisations that are global,” he said.
The San Francisco-based data and AI platform, valued at $134 billion with an annualised revenue run rate of $6.9 billion, has partnered with enterprises such as Reliance and counts Zepto, Freshworks and InMobi among its customers.
In 2025, the company announced a $250 million investment in India spanning training, research and development, and workforce expansion.
While Databricks did not disclose regional financials, Tavakoli said India now rivals some of the company's largest global markets in terms of scale and revenue.
“The region is not just nice from a revenue perspective but is one of the major markets for us globally,” he said.
Currently, there is huge excitement in the US around AI, with giants such as OpenAI and Anthropic reportedly listing this year after confidential filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Tavakoli said that they are not in a rush and will go public when the timing is right.
On questions about the AI bubble, he said there is a worry that a lot of capital has chased AI companies and now there is a bit of a reckoning where people are looking at the cost involved. "But from our perspective, I think whether we call it agentic or intelligent apps, that transformation is absolutely here to stay. Our notion is that if we focus on grounded use cases and driving outputs like we are doing with many of the customers, I think we'll be okay," he added.
For Databricks, AI revenue accounts for about $1.7 billion of the $6.9 billion ARR, Tavakoli pointed out.
Tavakoli rejected the view that AI-driven automation will inevitably reduce employment. Instead, he argued that the technology expands the scope of what organisations can achieve.
“I think that there's two sides to this. On one side, where everybody says that the amount of work is fixed and bounded. If I automate it, why do I need more people? We look at it at the opposite end,” he said.
According to Tavakoli, AI has made the range of possible applications almost limitless while allowing organisations to move much faster. Tasks that once took weeks or months can now be completed within hours.
“So now my appetite for experimentation and prototyping went up,” he said.
On the impact of AI on SaaS and IT companies, Tavakoli said, “I think that the worry about the foundation model providers going up the stack, you don't see that come to pass”.
As AI adoption grows, enterprises will increasingly seek the freedom to choose between models such as Claude, OpenAI offerings and open-source alternatives rather than being locked into a single ecosystem, he added.
(The reporter was in San Francisco for the Databricks Data+AI Summit at the invitation of the company.)
