StarTree raises $24 million in funding to usher in a new era of user-facing analytics

StarTree, a Silicon Valley-based tech startup, today announced it has raised $24 million in Series A funding led by Bain Capital Ventures and GGV Capital, with investment from existing investor CRV. The startup will use the new capital to build and offer a cloud analytics-as-a-service platform built around Apache Pinot™, which is uniquely designed to serve up fresh analytics at scale with low latency for thousands or millions of users.

The new round follows a $4 million seed funding previously raised in November 2019, which was led by CRV with additional investment from LinkedIn and individual investors. Backers for the seed fund include Neha Narkhede, co-founder at Confluent; Gokul Rajaram, DoorDash executive, and Coinbase board member; Jason Warner, CTO at GitHub; Igor Perisic, Chief Data Officer at LinkedIn; Raghu Hiremagalur, CTO at LinkedIn; Jason Forget, CRO at Redis Labs; and Chet Kapoor, CEO at DataStax

StarTree was founded by Apache Pinot’s creators, who built and operated the real-time analytics platform at LinkedIn and Uber. Apache Pinot has now been proven at scale by LinkedIn, Stripe, Uber, Walmart, Weibo, WePay, and many others. StarTree will use the investment to spur broad adoption of user-facing analytics, as progressive data-driven companies provide real-time insights to customers and business partners to grow their engagement and revenue.

StarTree’s investors believe that user-facing analytics will grow into a multi-billion dollar market opportunity. Examples of user-facing analytics include more than 50 LinkedIn products, all powered by Apache Pinot, ingesting millions of events per second and serving more than 150,000 queries per second at millisecond latency. Sample applications include LinkedIn’s Who Viewed My Profile, LinkedIn’s Company Analytics, and UberEats Restaurant Manager.

“Real-time analytics is moving beyond the enterprise, as digital pioneers increasingly see value in exposing insights to their customers, partners, and franchisees,” said Enrique Salem, partner at Bain Capital Ventures. “That creates new pressure on existing data infrastructures, which are inadequate for real-time use cases. Data warehouses, data lakes, and stream processing systems are all part of the modern data stack, but enterprises still need better ways to federate and serve up fresh analytics at scale with low latency. We believe a new generation of real-time OLAP data stores will meet the need, and StarTree is well-positioned to become the category leader based on their groundbreaking work with Apache Pinot.”

“StarTree represents one of the best early technical teams I’ve ever seen in my venture career,” said Max Gazor, General Partner at CRV which led the Series Seed round in the company. “Under Kishore’s leadership, the company has very quickly built the market’s leading real-time data platform that companies of all sizes can leverage.”