Starburst Highlights Impressive Company and Customer Growth, Driven by Rapid Adoption of SaaS Solution Starburst Galaxy

Company debuts on Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies, fueled by demand to serve as foundation of Data Mesh and Data Lakehouse architectures  

Boston, USA, August 16, 2022—Starburst, the analytics anywhere company, today announced significant company and customer momentum as the industry’s demand for faster analytics on decentralized data continues to heat up. Starburst marked the end of Q2 with 3x YoY annual recurring revenue (ARR) growth, 122% YoY customer growth, and 61% YoY employee growth.

On the heels of a $250M Series D funding round led by Alkeon Capital, Starburst ramped up operations by announcing David Freeman as the company’s first-ever Chief Financial Officer. Freeman brings more than two decades of leadership experience in finance, strategy, and operations from companies like Intel, NetSuite, Nutanix, Palo Alto Networks, and ThoughtSpot. Starburst also 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. Most recently, she was the head of product at Atlassian where she was instrumental in their transition from self-managed to cloud-centric products.

Starburst’s continued growth is a testament to the company’s commitment to product innovation. Less than a year after its introduction, Starburst closed its first-ever seven-figure customer deal for Starburst Galaxy, the company’s managed service, and expanded its global customer base, including Société Générale, VMware, and Würth Group. Following Starburst’s acquisition of data lake analytics accelerator Varada in June, Starburst’s  Smart Indexing and Caching will soon be available in limited preview on AWS, enabling customers to reduce cloud compute costs by up to 40% and increase query performance by up to 7x. 

“With our analytics engine uniquely positioned to work with different data architectures including Data Mesh and Data Lakehouse, we’re able to empower our customers to make better and faster decisions regardless of where their data lives,” said Justin Borgman, CEO and Co-Founder of Starburst. “Our self-service Galaxy product is yet another growth lever for us, putting that same powerful processing engine in the hands of even more data professionals while removing their need to manage infrastructure.”

“I’m really proud of generating an outcome for humanity that has changed the way we treat COVID-19 with Starburst,” said Richard Jarvis, CTO of EMIS Group. “We have published groundbreaking research on the treatment of COVID-19 based on analytics done by Starburst on our data.” 

In 2022, Starburst also received various notable industry recognitions including being featured 825th on the Inc. 5000 list, being named the “Data Access Solution of the Year” in the 2022 Data Breakthrough Awards program, being included as a Representative Vendor in the 2022 Gartner® Market Guide for Analytics Query Accelerators, being awarded “Growth Gamechanger” for Cloud Marketplace innovation by Tackle.io, and being shortlisted in the Women in IT Awards. 

Starburst’s recent highlights and milestones include:

Corporate Momentum

• Employee growth: Starburst grew employee headcount by 61% in the last 12 months. The company also made several top employer lists such as Forbes’ America’s Best Startup Employers 2022 and Built In’s Best Places to Work in Boston.
• Financing and investors: Starburst’s Series D funding round, led by Alkeon Capital, with participation from Altimeter and B Capital Group, brought the four-year-old company’s total financing to $414 million with a market valuation of $3.35 billion. 
• EMEA acceleration: Starburst’s customer base grew by 300% over the last year with the inclusion of industry leaders like Glovo, Sky, and Standard Chartered Bank to its impressive list of customers. This growth was underpinned with 35 new hires to the EMEA team.

Product Innovation

• New Lakehouse capability: 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. Users can now use Iceberg and Delta Lake features to automate tedious data chores including clustering, caching, small-file compaction, catalog syncing, and scaling table metadata.

• 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 compliance, showing its dedication to meeting highest security standards in the industry. 

• Starburst Galaxy security enhancements: Starburst continues to add to its security story, with users now able to define cluster and data source access down to the table-level. This ensures that only the users who need access to the data are able to access it. 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 security enhancements: Starburst added built-in access control, enabling any customer to leverage strict fine-grained access control and compliance on all data. These native capabilities make it easy to configure any user’s correct access rights to catalogs and to individual schemas, and tables. The built-in roles and privileges extend not only to the data, but also web UI permissions and Data Products. Data Products were unveiled at Starburst’s annual Datanova conference, which allows data producers to create, maintain, and share high-quality, curated datasets. 

Customer and Partner Excellence

• Customer growth: 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: Starburst announced a partnership with Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, to deliver Starburst Enterprise to the Greater China market. 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. 

A first-of-its-kind technology partner showcase — Datanova: Taking Data Mesh from Theory to Practice — is being organized by Starburst on Sept. 29, 2022.  Save your seat now.  

Open Source Trino Community Growth

• Trino’s 10th anniversary: 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 more than 5.9K stargazers on GitHub, up 269% since December 2020 when PrestoSQL rebranded to Trino, and thousands of global companies leveraging it to accelerate data analytics.
• Second annual Trino Summit: In May, Starburst held its second annual Trino Summit, which included some big announcements for the Trino community including the first beta delivery of the work from Project Tardigrade and integrations with popular ELT tools. 

Registrations for the upcoming Trino Summit —  a hybrid event at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, CA on Nov. 10, 2022 — are also now open. Save your seat now.  

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 Apache Corporation, Comcast, Doordash, FINRA, Marks and Spencer, and VMware, Starburst helps companies make better decisions faster on all data.