Data analytics tech startup Starburst raises $42M in funding to provide a single access point to all enterprise data; doubles its valuation to $3.35 billion

Starburst, a spinoff from Facebook’s open-source project Presto, has raised a $250 million Series D funding round led by venture capital firm Alkeon Capital, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz and Coatue Management. Altimeter Capital, B Capital Group, Index Ventures, and Salesforce Ventures also participated in the new funding round.

The latest round more than doubled the company’s valuation to $3.35 billion, from $1.2 billion last year after a $100 million Series C funding round led by Silicon Valley-based Andreessen Horowitz. Starburst intends to use the new capital infusion to ramp up hiring, tap into new international markets and invest in the development of products.

We first wrote about Starbust in 2020 when the company raised $42M in funding to power the world’s fastest distributed SQL query engine.

Founded in 2017 by the largest team of Presto committers outside of Facebook, the Boston, Massachusetts-based Starburst started off as part of the Facebook open-source project Presto distributed query engine. At the core of Starburst is Presto, an SQL query engine developed by Facebook that allows major companies like Twitter and Netflix to process their data from anywhere.

Its clients include freelancing platform Upwork, apparel retailer Marks & Spencer (MKS.L), and media giant Condé Nast among its customers.

Starburst’s founders include Justin Borgman (CEO), Kamil Bajda-Pawlikowski, Matt Fuller, and Piotr Findeisen, Wojciech Biela. Borgman and a company he co-founded earlier called Hadapt spent years contributing to Presto. In 2017, the open-source project began to gain momentum, and Borgman’s team decided to start a new business around that, and Starburst was born.

Using the open-source Presto SQL engine, the Starburst Distribution of Presto provides fast, interactive query performance across a wide variety of data sources including HDFS, Amazon S3, MySQL, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, Cassandra, MongoDB, Kafka, and Teradata, among others.  Starburst has quietly bootstrapped itself to profitability, with an impressive customer roster including organizations like Comcast, FINRA, and Zalando.

“We’re currently active in Europe and North America (Canada and U.S.) but we’re looking to expand into Asia-Pacific this year,” Borgman said.

Abhi Arun, managing partner at Alkeon Capital, also told Reuters he expects companies to continue the migration to the cloud and spend on data analytics even after COVID-19, which will help Starburst sustain its pandemic-fueled growth.

“In our view, in 2022, the spend on data analytics, data ecosystem, and business insights tools are actually going to be larger than prior year so we think this year is going to be an even higher growth year for Starburst,” Arun said.