Ion Stoica | $1B+

Billionaire

Oct 6

Get in touch with Ion Stoica | Ion Stoica, computer scientist and entrepreneur, is cofounder and executive chairman of Databricks, one of the world’s most valuable data and AI companies. A professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Stoica is also a co-creator of Apache Spark, the open-source framework that revolutionized big data processing. Under his leadership, Databricks has scaled into a multibillion-dollar enterprise serving global enterprises with cloud-based analytics and AI platforms. Known for bridging academia and industry, Stoica has become a leading figure in advancing the future of data infrastructure and machine learning.

Disclaimer: This profile is based on publicly available information. No endorsement or affiliation is implied.

Ion Stoica (born 1964 or 1965) is a Romanian–American computer scientist specializing in distributed systems, cloud computing and computer networking.[9][2][10][11] He is a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley and co-director of AMPLab. He co-founded Conviva and Databricks with other original developers of Apache Spark[6][12] and Anyscale[13] with other original developers of Ray.[14]

Ion Stoica
Stoica in 2025
BornIon Stoica
1964 or 1965 (age 60–61)[4]
Citizenship Romanian, American
Alma mater Carnegie Mellon University
Known for Chord
Apache Spark
Apache Mesos
Alluxio
AwardsACM Fellow
SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award
Scientific career
Fields

Cloud computing
Networking
Distributed systems
Big data

InstitutionsUniversity of California, Berkeley
Databricks
Conviva
ThesisStateless Core: A Scalable Approach for Quality of Service in the Internet (2000)
Doctoral advisorHui Zhang[3]
Doctoral students

Boon Thau Loo
Haoyuan Li
Matei Zaharia
Sylvia Ratnasamy
Mosharaf Chowdhury

Websitewww.cs.berkeley.edu/~istoica

As of April 2025, Forbes ranked him and Matei Zaharia as the 3rd-richest people in Romania with a net worth of $2.7 billion.[15]

Contents

Education

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Stoica was born in Romania, where he grew up and attended Polytechnic University of Bucharest, receiving a MS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 1989. He moved to the U.S. in 1994 to start a PhD at Old Dominion University with computer-science professor Hussein Abdel-Wahab.[16][17] Together with Wahab, in 1995 he published the algorithm for earliest eligible virtual deadline first scheduling,[18] which is the current process scheduler in the Linux kernel.[19] In 1996, he transferred to Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), where in 2000 he received a PhD in Electrical & Computer Engineering supervised by Hui Zhang.[3][20] Subjects included Chord (peer-to-peer), Core-Stateless Fair Queueing (CSFQ), and Internet Indirection Infrastructure (i3).

Career and research

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Stoica has been a Berkeley professor since 2000. His research interests include cloud computing,[21][22] networking, distributed systems and big data.[2] He has authored or co-authored more than 100 peer reviewed papers in various areas of computer science.[2][23][24][25]

Stoica was a co-founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Conviva in 2006,[26] a company that came out of the End System Multicast project at CMU. In 2013 he co-founded Databricks, serving as its chief executive until being replaced by Ali Ghodsi in January 2016, when he became executive chairman.[27]

He is one of the inventors of dominant resource fairness.

Awards

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Stoica under the supervision of his doctoral advisor Hui Zhang won the Association for Computing Machinery Ph.D. dissertation Award in 2001 for his thesis Stateless Core: A Scalable Approach for Quality of Service in the Internet (2000).[20][28][29] Stoica is the recipient of a SIGCOMM Test of Time Award (2011), the 2007 CoNEXT Rising Star Award, a Sloan Foundation Fellowship (2003) and a PECASE Award (2002). Stoica is also an ACM Fellow.[1] In 2019, Stoica received the SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award.[30]

Philanthropy

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In June 2021, Berkeley announced that Stoica had donated $25 million toward the university's computing and data science initiatives, making him and colleague Scott Shenker two of Berkeley's largest benefactors.[

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