Starburst

/ Startups / By
Co-Founders Justin Borgman & Matt Fuller – Starburst Website

Founders: Justin Borgman, Matt Fuller
Founding: 2017
Mission: Free our customers to see the invisible and achieve the impossible
Employees: 350 & ~20% Local
Workplace: Hybrid
Stage & Capital Raised: Series D & $414M Raised
Investors: Alkeon Capital with Altimeter, B Capital Group, a16z, Coatue Management, Index Ventures, and Salesforce Ventures
Key Customers: Comcast, DoorDash, ZoomInfo, Zillow, Standard Chartered, VMWare & many more
Glassdoor Rating: 3.3
Valuation (estimated): $2B – $3B+ (they were last valued at $3.35B in the Q4 ‘23 $250M fundraise)
^ this is a useless number. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!

Starburst is building an end to end cloud software analytics platform for cloud and on-premise workloads, with industry leading price-performance. Because you don’t need to bring sand to the beach trying to centralize & analyze data…when you can use Starburst’s more flexible open Lakehouse. Wabam!

Founded in 2017 by serial entrepreneur Justin Borgman & Matt Fuller, Starburst is on a mission to free their customers to see the invisible and achieve the impossible. What that means in cloud parlance is easier, more flexible access to data regardless of where it lives.

Pretend you work at a large retailer. You have multiple sales channels – physical stores, a website, and a mobile app. Each channel generates customer data…in separate systems. Unsung heroes spend their days gluing reports together and bending the curvature of the earth to get their bosses what they need. Shouldn’t there be a better way?

Starburst breaks down data silos by unifying customer data where they reside, without data warehouse centralization needed. Starburst Enterprise helps companies like the aforementioned large retailer and their stressed out reporting gurus produce usable analysis at scale more efficiently.

Starburst leverages Trino, fka PrestoSQL, created by former Facebook engineers Dain Sundstrom, David Phillips, Martin Traverso, and Eric Hwang who designed this open source project for interactive analytics. The Trino query engine provides a quick and easy way to allow access to datasets from a variety of sources. End users don’t have to learn any new complex language or new tool; they can simply utilize existing tools for analytics with which they are comfortable (and I didn’t need to learn it either as that sentence is right on Starburst’s website)!

Querying data accurately and on time is an essential workflow in 2024. AWS launched in 2006! We’ve spent almost 20 years getting data into the cloud and it’s proliferated into tools all across the enterprise. The cloud computing market is $600B+ and expected to eclipse $1T by the end of the decade (src). Unifying data without going through a painstaking centralization process helps make analysis easier without hiring expensive consulting integrations teams. I mean those people will stay on projects for years!

Starburst has two product platforms – Starburst Galaxy and Starburst Enterprise. Starburst Galaxy is their fully managed cloud offering and Starburst Enterprise allows self management anywhere. Both platforms handle a variety of use cases I’ll let you dig into on your own time, integrating with BI tools like Looker, Tableau, Metabase, etc. across 50+ data sources and leverage a usage based pricing model. 

In February of 2022 they announced a $250M Series D financing led by Alkeon Capital with Altimeter, B Capital Group, Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue Management, Index Ventures, and Salesforce Ventures participating. 

In March of 2024 they announced the appointments of Steven Chung as President, Tobias Ternstrom as Chief Product Officer, and Adam Ferrari as Senior Vice President of Engineering (s/o Endeca mafia) to help guide them into the next era of company building & growth. 

Operators to Know (Locally):

My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the Starburst team I know I missed many up & coming operators internally

Key Roles To Be Hired:

If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:

  • What are the key goals for 2024?
  • What are the biggest challenges as you scale the team to an enterprise level across multiple global offices and product lines?
  • What is the long term vision for the company? 
  • What are the most important roles you’ll be looking to add in 2024 // teams that need the most help?

We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about Starburst you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring more fragmented enterprises into a unified, accessible digital age. All analysts & strategists applaud your efforts. See you around town!

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