Starburst Nabs $250M for Open Analytics on Data Mesh

Starburst today announced the completion of a $250 million Series D round of financing that values the analytics company at $3.35 billion. It also unveiled new product feature as it kicked off its virtual Datanova: Data Mesh Summit, which continues through tomorrow.

Starburst is the commercial outfit behind Trino, the SQL query engine that forked from Presto SQL in December 2020. The Boston, Massachusetts company, which was spun out of Teradata in 2017, sells an on-prem version of Trino as well as a hosted version that customers can access from the cloud.

Starburst says it tripled its business over the past 12 months and grew its headcount by 3x too. Much of that growth ostensibly came from the cloud via its hosted Starburst Galaxy offering, which it launched exactly a year ago. The company also opened new offices in the UK, Germany, and France as European business grew.

The company says customers like Zillow, Standard Chartered, and Carrefour Brazil are getting good results using Starburst’s technology atop data lakes or lake houses. It says its offering helped FINRA detect fraud, helped AssuranceIQ to increase conversion rates by 10%, and helped Priceline reduce data storage costs.

The Series D 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. And at $3.35 billion, the round coincides with nearly a tripling of Starburst’s valuation from January 2021, when it raised $100 million in a Series C that valued the firm at $1.2 billion.

Starburst today launched new features in Starburst Enterprise that allow companies to build and share data products. It also brings new access controls that form the foundation of a data mesh implementation, the company says.

Starburst CEO and co-founder Justin Borgman

The company also kicked off its Datanova: Data Mesh Summit today, the start of a two-day event dedicated to exploring the new data mesh architecture and related concepts. Zhamak Dehghani, the director of emerging technologies at Thoughtworks North America and the creator of the data mesh concept, is one of the guest speakers at the event.

According to CEO and co-founder Justin Borgman, the data mesh is the right idea for today’s big data practitioners.

“Today companies are on a collision course between their business needs and the papabiles of their technology presently,” he said during his keynote address at the Datanova: Data Mesh Summit today. “Every organization wants their team to be data driven. They want their business to use data as a competitive advantage.

“But because data is everywhere and the leading analytic systems limit how much data you can move and how quickly you can analysis it, we’re stuck. Teams waste time waiting. Data engineers spend all their time building and managing pipelines. I think we can all agree that we need a better way, a way that really empowers our teams to access all the data we need when we need it. One that doesn’t force hard tradeoffs in the cost versus capability. Data mesh is the big idea for a better way forward.”

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