Starburst Data, a big-data start-up, which is about Presto open-source query engine technology, has raised USD 42 million in Series B financing.
The amount of funding will be used to uplift the market that includes alliances with cloud platform vendors and the development of a partner program. Also, there will be steps taken to expand the engineering team that will help in the development of the company’s Starburst Enterprise Presto flagship product.
Before this, the Series A funding round was held in November 2019, which brought in USD 22 million.
“That’s really what makes Presto unique,” said CEO Justin Borgman in an interview with CRN. “Because Presto doesn’t store data, it allows more flexibility.” He described the technology as functioning like a distributed database, only without the data storage function.
“Our mandate is to get the most value out of our data. Starburst is helping us merge our data together so our analytics teams across the enterprise can do their best work,” said Aaron Gregory, VP of Enterprise Data Services at Condé Nast. “Starburst is a great connective tissue layer between all of our data sources and our business intelligence and analytics tools,” he added.
Presto is a high-performance, distributed SQL query engine for finding and analyzing data that resides in a variety of data sources. The company was originally developed by Facebook, and the social media giant open-sourced the Presto technology in 2013. Presto runs in the cloud and can be used to query and analyze data spread across multiple systems. It holds separate identities from traditional data analysis systems, as it can query data where it resides without having to move it.
In addition to offering a free-distribution of open-source Presto Software, Starburst markets Starburst Enterprise Presto, the vendor commercial edition with added management capabilities, security, and support services. Starburst creates and offers editions of software running on some significant cloud platforms: Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud Platform.
The main reason for Starburst’s popularity or demand driver is the ability of its software to work across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid-cloud systems. Borgman said, “I think what’s driving our success right now is the fact that a lot of companies are in transition between on premise and cloud.”
There is a danger of a fork in the Presto open-source technology due to competing Presto foundations. This foundation came out in 2018, started by the technology’s developers who left Facebook to continue their work and co-founded Starburst and Presto foundation. Starburst caught profitability in the early years before last year’s Series A funding. The recent Series B funding was led by financial firm Coatue with the participation from Index Ventures.
Harrison Johnson, Head of Partnerships, Starburst, in an interview with CRN, said that Starburst is working to build itself into a partner-first company. Apart from the cloud platform vendors, the company also works with system integrators, solution providers, including BlueMetal, part of channel giant insight and BigData Boutique. Starburst is selling the software directly as well as with partners.
“Companies are tired of technology investments that don’t deliver. In the data management world, technologies are often too expensive, lock in data, and don’t deliver on the speed companies need to make better business decisions,” said Justin Borgman, CEO of Starburst. “We’re at a moment in time where companies need to act quickly on data, while lowering technology costs wherever they can. As an open source analytics company, Starburst is well-positioned to help them do both,” he added.
The reports talk about Starburst will continue expanding its partner ecosystem for bringing in ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) and managed service providers.
About Starburst
Founded by the creators of Presto, Starburst unlocks the value of data by allowing its easy access from anywhere and at any time. It is an open-source company that queries data across the database, making it easy to use for organizations. Starburst contributes to lower down the cost of infrastructure, investment in analytics, and giving the tools that work best for client’s businesses. Overall, the mission is to power analytics anywhere.
