About Starburst
Starburst was founded in 2017 by Justin Borgman, Kamil Bajda-Pawlikowski, and Matt Fuller, building a commercial business around Trino, an open-source distributed SQL query engine originally developed at Facebook (under the name Presto) to let analysts run fast SQL queries against very large datasets stored across Facebook's massive data infrastructure, and later open-sourced and adopted broadly across the technology industry, based on the observation that many enterprises have data scattered across many different underlying data storage systems, including traditional databases, data lakes, and various cloud data warehouses, but historically needed to either consolidate all this data into a single unified system before analysis, a slow and expensive process, or accept limited, siloed analysis capability restricted to whatever single data source a given analytical tool could directly connect to.
Starburst's platform, built on Trino, lets analysts run SQL queries that can span and join data across many different underlying data sources simultaneously, without first needing to physically move and consolidate all that data into a single unified data warehouse, an architectural approach often described as a "data mesh" or "federated query" capability that can significantly reduce the time, cost, and data duplication involved in enabling broad analytical access across an enterprise's often highly fragmented data landscape, spanning many different databases, data lakes, and cloud data warehouses accumulated over time as different teams and business units have adopted different underlying data storage technologies. The company has positioned this federated querying capability as particularly valuable for large enterprises with significant data fragmentation across many different systems and teams, letting these organizations enable broader data analysis and self-service analytics capability without the very significant time and cost investment that would otherwise be required to consolidate all relevant data into a single unified data warehouse before analysis becomes possible. Starburst's customers span large enterprises across many industries dealing with significant data fragmentation across multiple underlying data storage systems. The company has raised substantial venture funding from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue, and Salesforce Ventures, reaching a valuation exceeding $3.35 billion.
