Databricks to ramp up India hiring, R&D: CIO Naveen Zutshi

Data analytics and AI software company Databricks is stepping up hiring and investments in India as demand from enterprise clients accelerates. The San Francisco-based company is expanding its research and development (R&D) footprint in Bengaluru as it records double-digit growth in its India business, a top executive told ET.

Right now, our overall India team is just shy of 1,000 people. The goal is to continue aggressively hiring this year as well, both in R&D and in go-to-market roles, said Naveen Zutshi, chief information officer at Databricks, in an interaction with ET.

“We have seen good growth here.. Initially, we were more focused on digital natives, but over the last two to three years, we have seen a massive shift on the enterprise side as well,” he added.


Privately held Databricks was last valued at $134 billion while it raised $7 billion in equity and debt earlier this year.

Its major investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Nvidia, Insight Partners, and Coatue Management. In 2025, the company was reported to be clocking an annual recurring revenue run rate of $4.8 billion.

For comparison, the current market value of India’s biggest listed technology company, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), is $94.3 billion.

Databricks, which competes with the likes of Snowflake, counts a mix of startups and large enterprises among its clients in India, including Swiggy, Cred, Zepto, Freshworks, IndusInd Bank and Hindalco Industries.

These companies are using the platform for a range of applications, including customer support automation, fraud detection, personalised recommendations and real-time analytics.
India-born Zutshi, a Bangalore University graduate, worked at Palo Alto Networks, Zoom and other firms before joining Databricks in 2022. He said the company has already begun deploying part of the $250 million it had committed to India, including through the launch of a major R&D centre in Bengaluru focused on building core elements of its data and AI platform.

“Right now, our India team is just shy of a thousand people. But the goal is to continue to aggressively hire this year as well,” Zutshi said.

He added that much of the core platform development work is being carried out by the India engineering teams, alongside work on integrations and connectors that help enterprises link their internal systems to the Databricks platform.

India is now among Databricks’ fastest-growing markets globally, with revenue growth, Zutshi said, driven by financial services companies and large enterprises adopting AI-led transformation. “We are growing at double digits here in India and we have seen massive growth both in terms of the investments we have made and the number of customers,” he said.

According to Zutshi, enterprises are increasingly looking to consolidate fragmented technology stacks onto a single data and AI platform, which can help reduce costs by 40-50%.

He added that the role of technology leaders at enterprises is also evolving rapidly as artificial intelligence becomes central to business strategy.

“Every CIO that I talk to, that is one of the first questions their CEO and board are asking them: what is your AI strategy and how are you deploying AI to transform the business,” he said.

With strong engineering talent, a large domestic market and vast volumes of data, India is emerging as a key innovation hub for AI development, making it an important part of Databricks’ long-term global strategy, Zutshi said.

On India’s role in AI, he said that there was massive potential in building applications. “You can see smaller teams building agentic-first solutions that could disrupt traditional software companies… It’s still early… but when I talk to VCs and founders you can see what they are trying to build.”

But with AI impacting jobs in India across large employment generating sector like IT services, Zutshi said there will definitely be disruption. “There is going to be disruption of existing jobs… jobs will be reconstructed… AI fluency in your job is a must now…”, he said.