3 Public Clouds. 2 Products. 1 Fast-Growing Company.

2021 was a year filled with major milestones here at Starburst.  We tripled the business by every metric, established ourselves as the definitive query engine for emerging Data Mesh architectures, and launched our brand new SaaS product Galaxy.  On that last point, with Galaxy, we have put the power of our platform in an easy-to-consume package.  Now companies of all shapes and sizes can leverage Starburst to query their data everywhere.

I am also pleased to announce Javier Molina as Chief Revenue Officer at Starburst. With the launch of Galaxy on all 3 major public clouds last week, Javier’s arrival is perfectly timed.  The revenue engine behind Mongo Atlas is best-in-class in the industry and Javier played a critical role in leading that effort.  I am thrilled to bring his talents and experiences to Starburst as we begin the next chapter in our history.

Starburst’s recent highlights and milestones include: 

Corporate Momentum

• Financing and investors: Starburst’s Series C funding round provided additional growth resources and brought the three-year-old company’s total financing to $164 million with a market valuation to $1.2 billion. The financing round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Salesforce Ventures, as well as existing investors, Coatue and Index Ventures. This round made Starburst one of the fastest tech startups to reach unicorn status in the data and analytics space. 
• Employee growth: Starburst grew employee headcount by 3x in the last 12 months. Other leadership hires in addition to Javier include Toni Adams as VP of Partner & Alliances,  David Freeman as VP of Business Operations & Finance, and Adrian Estala, former Chief Data Officer at Shell, as Starburst’s VP, Data Mesh Consulting Services.

Product Leadership

• Launch of Starburst Galaxy: Starburst launched the public beta program for Starburst Galaxy, the industry’s first cross-cloud analytics solution that allows users to run interactive analytics across data sources in minutes, delivers performance at scale, and provides the freedom to be curious—without painful data movement, data duplication or vendor lock-in. 
• Starburst Enterprise Enhancements: Starburst has also doubled down on connectivity, performance, and security through many significant feature updates to Starburst Enterprise. Additionally, the availability of Starburst Insights, a web application for cluster and query reporting, provides a holistic view of performance and usage across the entire Starburst + Trino environment.
• Launch of Stargate: Starburst launched Stargate as an add-on for Starburst Enterprise, which enables organizations to run cross-cloud analytics on data distributed across the globe. Stargate also ensures compliance with global data sovereignty regulations, which is extremely important in the current data regulatory environment. 
• Investment in Data Mesh: Starburst’s roadmap is aligning to the Data Mesh architectural approach, with new features launching soon that allow for the creation and sharing of data products. Starburst also sponsored the upcoming O’Reilly book, “Data Mesh: Delivering Data-Driven Value at Scale” by Zhamak Dehghani, which has received more than eight thousand downloads in just two months. 

Customer and Partner Excellence

• Customer growth: Starburst grew its global customer base by 3x in the last 12 months. With Starburst’s universal data access and analytics solutions, companies like Comcast, FINRA, Zillow, and Condé Nast are making better and faster decisions on all of their data. 
• Launch of new channel program: Starburst unveiled Starburst Orbit, a channel program with key distribution partners across four continents, which has led to massive growth and opened access to new customers and opportunities. 
• Partner momentum: Earlier this month, Starburst announced a partnership with Red Hat as one of the inaugural members of the Red Hat OpenShift Data Science ecosystem. Starburst also announced the availability of Starburst Enterprise Trino on Google Cloud Marketplace earlier this year. Starburst is now available on six major public and private cloud platforms, including AWS, Azure, GCP, Red Hat, and HPE, and Alibaba Cloud.

Open Source Trino Community Growth

• Following the rebranding of PrestoSQL to Trino, the distributed SQL query engine community & code continues to flourish. Despite the rebrand, community members and engagement metrics have grown significantly: Slack members have grown 57%, Github stars have seen 157% growth, and YouTube subscribers have grown 206%. Today, the Trino community stands stronger than ever with companies such as Netflix, LinkedIn, Lyft, Nielsen, Shopify, Pinterest, Salesforce and more playing a key role in its ongoing development.
• Starburst hosted the Inaugural Trino Summit. On October 20-21, Starburst welcomed over 1,000 attendees to the first Trino summit where user talks were given by Netflix, Doordash, Robinhood, and more.

In no time at all, our second annual Datanova conference will be here (February 9-10). The focus for this year is all about Data Mesh and how this new strategy is driving the fastest time to insight for companies around the world.  I’ll be joined by Zhamak Dehghani, creator of the Data Mesh paradigm and Director of Next Tech Incubation at Thoughtworks, Teresa Tung, Accenture’s Cloud-First Chief Technologist, and countless industry leaders leverage Data Mesh in their own organizations.  Last, but not least, our keynote speaker is Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak!

Stay safe, stay warm, and happy holidays!

Best,

Justin Borgman