Andy Konwinski (born October 15, 1983) is an American computer scientist and entrepreneur. He is known for co-founding Databricks;[1][2], a global data and AI platform, and for his early contributions to Apache Spark. He also co-founded Perplexity, an AI-powered search engine, the early-stage venture capital firm Laude Ventures,[3] and Laude Institute,[4][5] a nonprofit institute for computer science researchers. His work bridges research and real-world deployment in software infrastructure and artificial intelligence.
After receiving his undergraduate degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Konwinski received his PhD from UC Berkeley, advised by Randy H. Katz.[6][7] During his time there, he contributed to Apache Hadoop and co-created Apache Mesos[8] and Apache Spark. He founded Databricks in 2013, with fellow AMPLab researchers Ali Ghodsi, Reynold Xin, Matei Zaharia, Ion Stoica, Patrick Wendell, and Arsalan Tavakoli.[9]
Konwinski co-founded Databricks and served as VP of Product Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, creator of the Data+AI Summit[15] and co-author of the O’Reilly Learning Spark Book.[16]
In 2024, he co-founded Laude Ventures, an early stage venture firm focused on investing in technical founders, mostly with research backgrounds, with Pete Sonsini and Andrew Krioukov.[18][3][19][20] In 2025, he pledged $100M to establish Laude Institute, an organization for computer science researchers, with Dave Patterson, Jeff Dean, and Joelle Pineau.[5][21]
He co-teaches UC Berkeley’s Research to Startup seminar.[22]
Recognition and pub
In 2025, Konwinski delivered the commencement address at the University of California, Berkeley for the College of Computing, Data Science, and Society. The address took place over two ceremonies at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley, California.[23][24][25]
At the 2024 NeurIPS conference in Vancouver, he announced the Konwinski Prize, a $1 million competition to advance AI capabilities in real-world software engineering, by incentivizing open-source progress on a contamination-free version of the SWE-Bench benchmark.[26][27]
In 2025, Konwinski and Turing Award recipient David Patterson gave academic talks on their "Shaping AI" paper to university computer science departments across the United States.[28][29][30]
References
↑ "Founders". Databricks. 3 March 2023. Retrieved 20 March 2025.
↑ Cuéllar M, Dean J, Doshi-Velez F, Hennessy J, Konwinski A, Koyejo S, Moiloa P, Pierson E, Patterson D (2024-12-11). "Shaping AI's Impact on Billions of Lives". arXiv:2412.02730 [cs.AI].
↑ Ghodsi A, Zaharia M, Hindman B, Konwinski A, Shenker S, Stoica I (2011). "Dominant resource fairness: Fair allocation of multiple resource types". 8th USENIX symposium on networked systems design and implementation (NSDI 11).
↑ Armbrust, M.; Fox, A.; Griffith, R.; Joseph, A. D.; Katz, R. H.; Konwinski, A.; Lee, G.; Patterson, D. A.; Rabkin, A.; Stoica, I.; Zaharia, M. (2009). "Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing". Technical Report UCB/EECS-2009-28, EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley.
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