I’m excited to announce today that Starburst has raised $42 million in Series B funding, just a little over six months after raising our $22 million Series A round in November. Given that we bootstrapped the company to profitability before ever raising a dollar in venture capital, that begs the obvious question, why raise money now?
Why Now?
First of all, we built a strong foundation over the first 2.5 years as a cash-flow positive business. We put customers first, we managed our expenses, and we built a real business. Authenticity is one of our core values at Starburst, and we believe it’s important to look our customers in the eye and credibly say “we’re building a company to stand the test of time.”
Second, we see an opportunity to accelerate in this difficult time. In a recession, companies tend to invest in technology that can help drive immediate business value, while offering a favorable total-cost-of-ownership. Starburst sits at the intersection of open source and analytics, well-positioned to help companies achieve their analytics goals while maximizing the value of their existing data infrastructure. Starburst is built for those enterprises that want fast and affordable access to their data anywhere and we’re working with organizations like Comcast, FINRA, Condé Nast and Zalando.
Open Source Is At The Core Of What We Do
According to Red Hat’s 2019 State of Open Source survey, 69% of IT professionals said that open source software is extremely or very important, with the main benefits including lower total cost of ownership and access to the latest innovations. Starburst was born out of open source Presto, with the Presto founding team at the center of our technical innovation. No one understands the opportunity for Presto better than Starburst, and our stewardship of Presto impacts everything we do as a company. This new round will allow us to contribute even more to the community that has brought us where we are today.
To learn more about Starburst, The COVID-19 Impact on Data & Analytics Strategy, and how open-source analytics companies like us can help, join our upcoming webinar with Noel Yuhanna, VP & Principal Analyst at Forrester Research.
A New Member Of The Starburst Family
It’s not lost on me that the current economy makes raising venture funding difficult for many startups, so we feel incredibly lucky to raise this round and add Coatue to our team. Coatue has established a portfolio of best-of-breed data companies like Databricks and Confluent, and we are thrilled to add Partner Caryn Marooney to our Board of Directors, joining Mike Volpi of Index Ventures. Caryn was a longtime Facebook executive and serves on the board of open-source role model, Elastic. Both partners understand the value of both open source and analytics, and know how to build great teams. In addition to this, they’re exceptional people, and that’s very important to me.
A Workhorse Among Unicorns
While $64M in six months is a lot of money, don’t let this fundraise fool you, we’ve always been focused on capital-efficient growth, and nothing has changed. Our ultimate goal is to be the first company to get to a $1 billion valuation on the least amount of capital raised. We’ve seen far too many Unicorns fail after burning through hundreds of millions in venture funding. Starburst is more of a Workhorse than a Unicorn.
I’m proud of the humble, genuine, and incredibly passionate team we’ve built so far. Our people understand the value of hard work and realize that success comes to those who earn it.
So here’s to being a Workhorse and building the next phase of Starburst. As we push forward on our vision to free our customers from the tyranny of data lock-in, we’re looking to build a team of All-Stars to help us develop an exceptional product and address customers’ needs across the globe.
Congratulations to our team for being an important part of this milestone. If you’re looking for an incredible opportunity to do your best work, we’re hiring.
