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January 6, 2021

Starburst Secures $100M Series C Financing Led by Andreessen Horowitz

BOSTON, Jan. 6, 2021 — Starburst, a Presto company, today announced $100 million in Series C funding, bringing the three-year-old company’s total financing to $164 million and valuation to $1.2 billion. The financing round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Salesforce Ventures, as well as existing investors Coatue and Index Ventures. Starburst customers include Comcast, FINRA, Condé Nast and Zalando, and its growth continues to be fueled by the fundamental shift in how organizations approach data access and analytics.

“To succeed in today’s digital economy, organizations need to break through the limits previously experienced when accessing their most critical asset – their data,” said David George, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. “With its disciplined approach, long-term vision, and workhorse mentality, Starburst is building the technology required to unlock the value of all data. By enabling organizations to access data wherever it resides, Starburst is providing the foundation for the future of the data-driven enterprise.”

As digital transformation becomes an operational requirement, organizations are relying on data-driven insights to develop a competitive advantage, reduce costs, and more quickly identify new opportunities. Unfortunately, even with millions of dollars invested in expensive data management tools, most organizations are still making decisions that are often too slow or based on incomplete, irrelevant data. This is a result of a data management paradigm known as the “Single source of truth” made famous by data warehouses decades ago. In order to achieve this vision, data teams have to move and centralize their data prior to analyzing it. The problem is it’s unachievable – there’s too much data. And there are too many data consumers who need fast access to more data today. Businesses can’t afford to wait for data movement and copies, and Starburst is ushering in the modern analytics paradigm: A single point of access.

Presto is the engine behind Starburst’s technology, and the company employs all four creators of the open source project. Originally developed at Facebook in 2012, Presto makes it possible to quickly analyze data anywhere.

“Today, the only constant is change, and organizations need to make faster and better decisions in order to adapt. Starburst is changing the game by allowing you to query the data wherever it lives,” said Justin Borgman, CEO and co-founder of Starburst. “We provide high-performance data warehousing analytics across data you never had access to before.”

Salesforce Ventures’ participation in the round is driven by Salesforce.com’s ownership of Tableau, the leading data visualization platform. Starburst allows Tableau users to quickly analyze and visualize data across multiple data sources without ever needing to leave the Tableau user interface.

“Empowering people with timely, trustworthy information that can be easily analyzed has never been more important as organizations look to adapt and evolve with a culture rooted in data,” said Francois Ajenstat, Chief Product Officer at Tableau. “Backed by an incredible team and vision, Starburst has set itself apart with best-in-class solutions that will help even more people unlock the power of data. We’re excited to partner closely with Starburst and look forward to watching their continued success unfold.”

On Feb. 9-10, 2021 Starburst will host their inaugural data strategy event, Datanova, which is open to all data enthusiasts.

About Starburst

Starburst unlocks the value of data by making it fast and easy to access anywhere. 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.


Source: Starburst

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