Dismantling the Status Quo Of Data Silos And Vendor Lock-In

Dear all, 

Starburst had a phenomenal 2022 and it is a reflection of the trust that our customers, partners and employees have in us. This trust has led to great momentum as we made our debut on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies, fueled by demand to serve as the foundation of Data Mesh and Data Lakehouse architectures. The prestigious list identifies the fastest growing companies in the United States, and Starburst was ranked #825 among all honorees, #103 among all software companies and #20 in Boston.

As we reflect on the year with an optimistic outlook on the year ahead, we recognize that the key to Starburst’s success are our employees. In 2022, we’ve nearly doubled our headcount, totalling upwards of 600 employees. When we say that investing in our All-Stars comes first, we mean it. We encourage our employees to bring their full selves along with their humility, ownership, inclusive meritocracy and grit to work. If you’re inspired to join our team, take a look at our open roles. 

From a leadership team perspective, earlier this year, we ramped up operations by announcing David Freeman as the company’s first-ever Chief Financial Officer. Another exciting addition is that we hired Alison Huselid as the Senior Vice President of Product Management who brings a wealth of industry experience from organizations like Adobe, Atlassian, Cisco, and IBM. 

Here are a few significant moments and milestones we’ve reached this year. 

Corporate milestones

• Financing and Valuation: Earlier this year, Starburst secured a $250 million Series D funding, nearly tripling its valuation to $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. 
• Acquisition of Varada, a data lake analytics accelerator: While Starburst’s best-in-class query engine already leads the industry in both performance and cost-efficiency, combining Varada’s proprietary and patented indexing technology sets a new standard for speed in data lake analytics.

Product Leadership

• Starburst Named in 2022 Gartner Market Guide for Analytics Query Accelerators: Our inclusion in both the 2020 and 2022 Gartner Market Guide for Analytics Query Accelerators speaks to our rapid growth and the power of our platform.. 

   Starburst Galaxy

• Great Lakes Connectivity: Starburst announced the Great Lakes connector for object storage catalogs. It enables users of the existing Amazon S3 , Azure Data Lake Storage, and Google Cloud Storage catalogs to leverage Iceberg and Delta Lake table formats, adding to the existing capabilities that support Hive tables. 
• Data Discoverability Features: Data lakes and warehouses can quickly become data swamps – murky or cluttered with disorganized data that presents significant challenges around accessibility and the ability to leverage the data for actionable insights. These new discoverability features are addressing these challenges, reducing time to discovery from hours to seconds, and laying the foundation for self-service Data Product curation, regardless of technical expertise.
• Soc 2 Type 1 and 2 and ISO 27001 compliance. To provide another layer of trust for both customers and partners, Starburst significantly advanced security protocols in Starburst Galaxy. Users can also now leverage the Single Sign-On (SSO) functionality to add an additional layer of security in Starburst Galaxy, providing organizations using Okta or Azure Active Directory the ability to centralize access to the platform. Starburst Enterprise

   Starburst Enterprise

• Advanced Data Product Functionality to Serve Cross-Border Use Cases: We recently announced enhanced functionality for building and sharing data products built on global datasets. This new functionality is supported by Starburst Stargate, which allows customers to link catalogs and data sources across geographies while ensuring access controls are in place and data residency requirements are honored. 

• Support for AWS Lake Formation to help joint customers implement the technical aspects of data mesh: By federating data across multiple AWS and third-party environments with Starburst Enterprise, organizations can realize the full value of their hybrid cloud investments, regardless of where the data resides. Starburst is empowering customers with a data mesh that allows cost-effective, multi-region analytics that doesn’t compromise compliance or data integrity.

Customer and Partner Excellence

• Customer growth: Today we have some of the best customer satisfaction, retention and net dollar retention scores in the industry. It is the solid foundation upon which we build this amazing company. Starburst grew its global customer base by 122% in the last 12 months and closed its first-ever seven-figure Starburst Galaxy customer.
• Partner momentum: The company launched executive briefing programs with Accenture and Slalom to engage CIOs and CDOs on Data Mesh. Starburst was also recognized as an FY22 Microsoft Partner of the Year finalist in the Rising Azure Technology category.
• Datanova: Taking Data Mesh from Theory to Practice: A first-of-its-kind technology and consulting partner showcase, this forum is designed to provide an accelerated learning opportunity to help data leaders take their best next step on their data mesh journey.

Thriving Open Source Trino Community 

• Starburst Celebrated Trino’s 10th Birthday: Starburst recently celebrated the tenth anniversary of the open source SQL query engine Trino. Started as open source project Presto in 2012, Trino has grown into one of the most widely adopted open source projects of the last decade with thousands of global companies leveraging it to accelerate data analytics.
• Starburst hosted the first hybrid Trino Summit. In November, Starburst welcomed about 750 attendees to our first hybrid event where user talks were given by Zillow, Lyft, Shopify, Goldman Sachs, Apple, Bloomberg, and many more. 

Awards and Accolades

We are also proud to have been recognized by several industry publications and organizations this year. We were on Forbes’ annual list of America’s Best Startup Employers and in the top 10 on Future by Andreessen Horowitz’s Data50: The World’s Top Data Startups, “Query and Processing”. 

• Award-winning products: We were awarded with the Datanami Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Award readers’ choice for Best Data and AI Product or Technology: Data Fabric/Data Mesh for Starburst Enterprise.
• Award-winning business For the fourth consecutive quarter, Starburst was featured in the insideBIGDATA Impact 50 list for Q4 2022, The companies on this list exhibit technology leadership, strong offerings, proven innovation and more – all of which are qualities that we strive to exemplify and bring to our stakeholders. 
• Award-winning culture: We are honored to be included in The Boston Globe’s Top Places to Work 2022 list. For the last 15 years, The Globe has recognized some of the best companies in the commonwealth, and we are appreciative of this inclusion, as we continue to highly value and prioritize our culture. If you’re looking to land at one of the top places to work, come and join our all-star team and company.

Datanova 2023: For the Data Rebels

Before you know it, the best annual data & analytics conference, Datanova will be here (February 8-9, 2023). This one’s for the data rebels and those who seek to not just ‘do data’ incrementally better, but different. I’ll be moderating a panel, joined by Zhamak Dehghani, creator of Data Mesh, Martin Casado, Partner at Andreesseen Horowitz, and Teresa Tung, Cloud-First Chief Technologist from Accenture, to discuss a question that’s on everyone’s mind: as data architectures evolve: how do we best evolve people, too?  

Thank you to our customers, partners and employees

Starburst’s continued momentum in 2022 is just the beginning of what we have planned for the future. We are committed to continuously improving our platform and providing the best possible experience for our customers. 

I want to take this opportunity to thank our dedicated team of employees for their hard work and commitment to excellence. Without their dedication and expertise, none of these achievements would be possible. 

Thank you for your continued support of Starburst. We are excited for what the future holds and look forward to continuing to work together. 

Happy holidays. 

Best, 

Justin Borgman
Co-founder & CEO, Starburst