Starburst, the analytics anywhere company, today announced it has secured a $250 million Series D funding round at a $3.35 billion valuation. The financing round was led by Alkeon Capital, with participation from Altimeter and B Capital Group, as well as existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue Management, Index Ventures and Salesforce Ventures. The round brings Starburst’s total financing to date to $414 million, as the company ramps up operations to meet the industry’s growing demand for faster analytics on decentralized data.
“Every organization has a top-down mandate to take more data-driven actions, but increases in data volumes have forced organizations to move, misplace and mismanage data, creating blind spots that can negatively impact decision-making,” said Justin Borgman, CEO and co-founder of Starburst. “Starburst streamlines data access and analytics across silos, clouds and business lines, enabling organizations to become truly data driven. Today’s financing is a reflection of our continued growth and ‘workhorse’ mentality, from achieving profitability in our first two years of operation to tripling customer adoption in the past 12 months.”
Starburst is breaking down legacy barriers created by a decades-old paradigm: The single source of the truth. This data centralization approach, commonly associated with data warehousing, requires data to move and be prepared prior to analyzing it. This process is expensive, creates data lock-in, and forces tradeoffs in how quickly data teams can analyze the data they need to make critical decisions.
Starburst is powering a new era of data analytics for companies across the globe, including Zillow, Standard Chartered, and Carrefour Brazil. Starburst removes the need to move data before analyzing it; significantly decreasing time to insight, and powering faster decisions. Core technical use cases span fast SQL-based queries on data lakes or lakehouses, through more complex use cases joining data sets on a distributed Data Mesh architecture. Ultimately, Starburst is able to help organizations like FINRA detect fraud, AssuranceIQ increase conversion rates by 10%, and Priceline reduce data storage costs.
“Starburst is a core part of the foundation of our data and analytics strategy at Priceline. We’ve been able to accelerate time-to-insight, while reducing our storage costs by 5X—10X by leaving the data in its raw form and accessing it through Starburst,” said Sachin Menon, Senior Director of Data, Priceline. “With Starburst, we’re building a solution that allows our data consumers to make faster decisions on more data, while reducing data engineering complexity and cost.”
Starburst is foundational to Data Mesh, a new approach to data management based on distributed data and treating data as a product. Starburst Enterprise is spearheading the delivery of data as a product, accelerating insights for domain users and freeing data teams from time-consuming manual tasks. Today, Starburst also announced new capabilities for Starburst Enterprise that enable organizations to build and share data products. Starburst Galaxy is a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) offering that enables data lake and lakehouse analytics, as well as cross-cloud analytics. Both solutions are based on open source Trino, the distributed query engine originally created at Facebook as Presto.
“At Slalom, we seek to create a modern culture of data with our clients and Data Mesh architecture is a key part of that strategy” said Anthony Gould, Senior Director of Data and Technology at Slalom. “We see clients already on the journey to Data Mesh and we are guiding clients through this transformation and see Starburst as an important and transformative technology in this journey.”
“The importance of data analytics has been magnified by the pandemic, as organizations require fresh insights to manage supply chain challenges, meet evolving customer needs and support a remote workforce,” said Abhi Arun, Managing Partner at Alkeon Capital. “Having fast access to more data sources will not only improve core business analytics, but also fuel machine learning models and accelerate artificial intelligence initiatives. By eliminating the need to move and centralize data in one location, Starburst is making it faster and easier for organizations to derive data-driven insights.”
Highlights of Starburst’s growth in 2021 include:
- The launch of Starburst Galaxy, bringing a powerful SaaS option to Starburst’s rapidly growing customer base.
- 3X growth in Starburst’s global customer base, following the establishment of Starburst’s European options based in the UK, now with operations in Germany and in France.
- Increased employee headcount by 3X, including key leadership hires Javier Molina as Chief Revenue Officer, Toni Adams as VP of Partner & Alliances, David Freeman as VP of Business Operations & Finance, and Adrian Estala, former Chief Data Officer at Shell, as Starburst’s VP, Data Mesh Consulting Services.
- Partner momentum including a partnership with Red Hat as one of the inaugural members of the Red Hat OpenShift Data Science ecosystem, the availability of Starburst Enterprise Trino on Google Cloud Marketplace and Alibaba Cloud. Starburst is now available on six major public and private cloud platforms, including AWS, Azure, GCP, Alibaba, Red Hat, and HPE.
Taking place February 9 – 10, Starburst is hosting Datanova: The Data Mesh Summit, which will focus on building business value through data management and analytics. To register, visit https://www.starburst.io/info/datanova2022/.
About Starburst
Starburst is the analytics engine for all your data. We provide the fastest, most efficient analytics engine for your data warehouse, data lake, or Data Mesh. We unlock the value of distributed data by making it fast and easy to access, no matter where it lives. Starburst queries data across any database, making it instantly actionable for data-driven organizations. With Starburst, teams can lower the total cost of their infrastructure and analytics investments, prevent vendor lock-in, and use the existing tools that work for their business. Trusted by companies like Comcast, FINRA, and Condé Nast, Starburst helps companies make better decisions faster on all data.
About Alkeon Capital
Alkeon Capital is a global investment firm that invests in private and public growth and technology companies and category definers. With more than two decades of experience focusing on People and Innovation, Alkeon works closely with disruptive private companies to help them expand their addressable market, scale efficiently, and seamlessly crossover to the public markets.
