Starburst
Starburst provides a federated data lakehouse platform — Starburst Galaxy (managed SaaS) and Starburst Enterprise (self-managed) — built on Trino, enabling large enterprises to query, govern, and operationalize AI across distributed cloud, hybrid, and on-premises data without moving it. Its customers include 4 of the top 5 global banks and Fortune-class firms across financial services, healthcare, telco, and defense.
- Company typePrivate
- Founded2017
- HeadquartersBoston, United States
- Headcount501–1,000
- GTM typeB2B
- OfferingSoftware
What Starburst does
Starburst Data, Inc. is a Boston-based, privately held data analytics company founded in 2017 by the original creators of Trino (formerly PrestoSQL). It builds a federated query and lakehouse platform — delivered as Starburst Galaxy (fully managed SaaS on AWS, GCP, and Azure) and Starburst Enterprise (self-managed across private cloud, hybrid, and on-premises environments) — that allows enterprises to query and govern data in place across more than 50 sources including data lakes, warehouses, relational databases, and SaaS systems. The platform is built on Trino and combines the open Icehouse architecture (Apache Iceberg + Trino), AI-Ready Data Products, an Enterprise Context Layer, and a conversational AI assistant called AIDA that exposes governed data to external agents via a Model Context Protocol endpoint.
Starburst generates revenue primarily through usage-based SaaS subscriptions on Starburst Galaxy and multi-year self-managed enterprise licenses on Starburst Enterprise, supplemented by professional services, tiered support (Developer, Business, Premium), and a Bring Your Own Cloud deployment option. Go-to-market is hybrid: direct enterprise field sales to large regulated customers (banks, insurers, healthcare, defense, telco), self-serve product-led growth via a free trial with up to $500 in usage credits, AWS Marketplace procurement, and channel distribution through Dell (where Starburst is embedded in the Dell AI Data Platform and AI Factory) and other technology partners including NVIDIA, Snowflake, Confluent, Qlik, Elastic, and Red Hat.
As of February 2026, Starburst reported surpassing $100 million in annual recurring revenue with nearly 40% year-over-year growth, a $20 million AI-specific run rate, and 85% year-over-year growth in financial services. The company is headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, employs 501–1,000 people, raised a $250 million Series D in February 2022 at a $3.35 billion valuation, and received a strategic investment from Citi in May 2025. Notable customers include 4 of the top 5 global banks and 10 of the top 15 global banks, alongside Comcast, Verizon, Novartis, Gilead, DoorDash, Royal Air Force, Optum, and S&P Global.
Starburst firmographics
Firmographics- Name
- Starburst
- Legal name
- Starburst Data, Inc.
- Website
- https://starburst.io
- Company type
- Private
- Founded year
- 2017
- Operating status
- Operating
- Headcount range
- 501–1,000 employees
- Short description
- Starburst provides a federated data lakehouse platform — Starburst Galaxy (managed SaaS) and Starburst Enterprise (self-managed) — built on Trino, enabling large enterprises to query, govern, and operationalize AI across distributed cloud, hybrid, and on-premises data without moving it. Its customers include 4 of the top 5 global banks and Fortune-class firms across financial services, healthcare, telco, and defense.
- Ownership category
- akta.pro rank
Starburst industry classification
Industry- Product category
- Data Lakehouse Platform
- NAICS
- Computing Infrastructure Providers, Data Processing, Web Hosting, and Related Services (5182), Computing Infrastructure Providers, Data Processing, Web Hosting, and Related Services (51821), Computer Systems Design and Related Services (54151), Computer Systems Design and Related Services (5415)
- SIC
- Services-Prepackaged Software (7372), Services-Computer Programming, Data Processing, Etc. (7370), Services-Computer Integrated Systems Design (7373)
- akta.pro primary industry
- Lakehouse Platforms (HDAEABAB)
- akta.pro secondary industries
- Data Platform (Unified Data & Analytics) Suites (HDAEABAD), Data Lake Platforms (HDAEABAC), Data Warehouse/Lakehouse Performance Optimization & Cost Management (HDAEABAL)
Keywords
Where Starburst is headquartered
LocationHeadquarters
- HQ city
- Boston
- HQ country
- United States
- HQ region
- North America
Offices1 record
Markets served
Starburst business model
Business model- GTM type
- B2B
- Offering type
- Software
- Cost components
- Personnel, Technology or R&D, Marketing or Sales, Infrastructure, Operations
Revenue model
- Starburst Galaxy usage-based subscription: Fully managed SaaS revenue billed by compute consumption against Starburst Galaxy clusters running in AWS, GCP, and Azure customers' cloud accounts. Free trial with up to $500 in usage credits serves as a land motion that converts to paid usage.
- Starburst Enterprise platform license: Self-managed enterprise license sold to large organizations, with multi-year contracts (notable eight-figure multi-year deal with a global financial institution) and premium 24x7 support tiers (Developer, Business, Premium).
- Professional Services: Scoped-separately professional services, onboarding, and education offerings for enterprise deployments, plus scoped ongoing account management for premium support customers.
- Managed / cloud-delivered service (Galaxy): Starburst operates the Galaxy control plane, clusters, and Warp Speed caches, and bills customers for managed cloud-delivered analytics on shared VPC infrastructure.
Pricing tiers
| Model | Billing | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Usage-based | Pay-as-you-go | Starburst Galaxy usage-based SaaS (consumption-priced) |
| Subscription | Multi-year contract | Starburst Enterprise self-managed license |
| Subscription | Annual | Support tiers: Developer / Business / Premium |
Go-to-market motion5 records
Distribution channels6 records
Marketing channels13 records
Starburst product offering
Product offeringCore offering
Starburst builds and sells a Trino-based enterprise data lakehouse platform that federates query access across cloud, on-premises, and hybrid data sources without moving the data. It is delivered as Starburst Galaxy (fully managed SaaS on AWS, GCP, and Azure) and Starburst Enterprise (self-managed platform), with an AI-Ready Data Products context layer, AIDA conversational AI assistant, and an Icehouse (Apache Iceberg + Trino) architecture for regulated enterprise analytics and AI workloads.
Differentiator
Problem solved
Functional benefit
Brands
- Starburst Galaxy: Fully managed enterprise intelligence platform delivered as a SaaS service, running in the cloud on AWS, GCP, and Azure.
- Starburst Enterprise
- AIDA
- Icehouse
- Starburst Warp Speed
Products and services
- Starburst Galaxy
- Starburst Enterprise
- AIDA (AI Data Assistant)
- Icehouse (Iceberg + Trino) architecture
- AI-Ready Data Products and Enterprise Context Layer
- Starburst Warp Speed
Quantifiable outcome
- 3.2x faster analytics
- +8 more outcomes
Companies that use Starburst
Customer profileNamed customers38 records
Segments8 records
Ideal customer profiles4 records
Starburst technology and API
TechnologyTechnology focussed Yes
API detail
- Has API
- Yes
- API docs
- API detail
Core technology
AI maturity
App detail
Integration36 records
AI capability4 records
Feature10 records
Starburst partnerships and signals
Strategic signalPartnerships
17 partnerships are on record, tiered core, minor and flagship.
- QlikcoreQlik and Starburst announced a strategic partnership to combine Qlik's data integration and analytics with Starburst's federated query engine and context layer. The companies are co-developing integrated solutions for federated access, hybrid reference architectures, and AI-assisted data pipelines, giving enterprises architectural choice across cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments.
- LeytonminorStarburst and Leyton joined forces to redefine deeptech innovation, leveraging Leyton's deeptech expertise alongside Starburst's data platform.
- Hays Caldwell Economic Development PartnershipminorStarburst and Hays Caldwell Economic Development Partnership launched a startup incubator to support early-stage companies in the region.
- NVIDIAcoreStarburst announced day-one support for NVIDIA's new Vera CPU, becoming the first open hybrid lakehouse platform optimized for the new hardware. The collaboration targets faster AI inference and analytics performance, with Starburst exploring GPU acceleration for Trino and validating Vera-compatible architectures. Starburst is also part of NVIDIA's broader AI Factory ecosystem via Dell and other partners.
- SnowflakecoreStarburst joined the Open Semantic Interchange (OSI), an open source initiative led by Snowflake to create a vendor-neutral specification for standardizing semantic data definitions across tools and platforms. The collaboration aims to enable consistent business metrics and definitions across BI, data governance, and AI tools.
- Dell TechnologiesflagshipDell Technologies and Starburst deepened collaboration in October 2025, with Starburst powering the Data Analytics Engine in the Dell AI Data Platform. The platform integrates PowerScale and ObjectScale storage with Elastic (search) and Starburst (analytics) as composable data engines, certified for NVIDIA GB200/GB300 NVL72, and underpins the Dell AI Factory. Starburst is positioned as a core analytics layer alongside Elastic and NVIDIA within Dell's enterprise AI stack.
- ConfluentcoreStarburst integrated Confluent Tableflow for streaming ingest into Apache Iceberg, with 100GB/sec Kafka-to-Iceberg streaming ingest pipelines (announced October 2024). Tutorial content demonstrates building streaming ingest pipelines with Confluent Kafka and Starburst Galaxy.
- ElasticcoreElastic powers the Data Search Engine in the Dell AI Data Platform alongside Starburst's Data Analytics Engine, with vector search capabilities for AI workloads. The integration is part of Dell's composable AI data platform.
- Red HatcoreStarburst Enterprise supports deployment on Red Hat OpenShift, as documented in the official Starburst Enterprise deployment guide.
- Amazon Web Services (AWS)flagshipStarburst Galaxy runs on AWS (us-east1, us-east2, us-west1, us-west2, eu-west1, eu-west2, eu-west3, eu-central1, ca-central1, ap-southeast1, ap-southeast2, ap-northeast1 per Galaxy status page) and supports AWS PrivateLink for Redshift, RDS, MongoDB Atlas, Snowflake, and other data sources. Starburst is also available via AWS Marketplace.
- Microsoft AzurecoreStarburst Galaxy runs on Microsoft Azure (eastus, eastus2, westeurope, southcentralus, francecentral, centralindia per status page) with integrations including Azure Synapse, Azure Data Lake Storage, Azure Private Link, and Azure Service Principal authentication.
- Google CloudcoreStarburst Galaxy runs on Google Cloud (us-central1, us-east1, europe-west2, europe-west6, asia-southeast1, asia-south1, southamerica-east1 per status page) with BigQuery, Google Cloud Storage, and Google Sheets catalog integrations.
- Apache Software Foundation / Trino projectflagshipStarburst is the commercial steward of Trino (formerly PrestoSQL), with founders of Trino leading Starburst engineering. The Starburst platform is built on Trino and is among the top contributors to the Trino and Presto codebases. Trino's open governance is under the Linux Foundation.
- CloudflarecoreCloudflare provides DDoS protection, firewall, and global threat protection for Starburst Galaxy's public-facing surface, supporting consistent speed, availability, and security for the SaaS platform.
- Schellman (ISO 27001 certification body)minorSchellman is Starburst's ISO/IEC 27001 certification body and also conducts Starburst's SOC 2 Type 2 attestation.
- VeracodecoreVeracode is Starburst's source of CVE truth and is used for static code scanning and software composition analysis on the Starburst Enterprise codebase.
- Datadog (former employer of CISO)minorDatadog is mentioned as a prior employer of Starburst CISO Paras Malhotra, not as a commercial partner.
Scale indicators17 records
Recent moves6 records
Expansion highlights6 records
Starburst competitors and assessment
Company assessmentDirect peers
- Databricks: Databricks is the leading commercial lakehouse platform built around Delta Lake, MLflow, and a Unity Catalog. It is Starburst's most direct head-to-head competitor for enterprise data + AI workloads and is named on Starburst's own competitive comparison pages.
- Snowflake: Snowflake is a major cloud data platform serving many of the same Fortune 500 customers. Starburst explicitly markets 'vs. Snowflake' and Starburst Galaxy can federate queries against Snowflake while competing for the broader data platform budget.
- Cloudera: Cloudera is an enterprise data platform with hybrid and on-premises deployments and a strong footprint in regulated industries. It targets the same hybrid analytics buyer as Starburst Enterprise and competes in similar financial-services accounts.
- Dremio: Dremio is a SQL lakehouse platform built on Apache Arrow and Iceberg with a similar open-lakehouse thesis to Starburst's Icehouse architecture. It directly competes for the same 'federated, open-format lakehouse' buyer segment.
Broad incumbents
- AWS Athena: AWS Athena is the hyperscaler-scale Trino-based serverless query service bundled into AWS. It overlaps materially with Starburst's federated query story but is sold as part of a much broader AWS portfolio at aggressive bundled pricing.
- Google BigQuery: BigQuery is Google Cloud's flagship serverless data warehouse with federated query and AI features. Starburst connects to BigQuery as a source while also competing with it for large enterprise analytics workloads.
- Microsoft Azure Synapse / Fabric: Microsoft's analytics portfolio (Synapse, Fabric, Power BI) competes with Starburst at the unified-data-platform layer and is sold alongside Azure infrastructure to enterprise customers, including Starburst's regulated buyers.
- Amazon Redshift: Redshift is AWS's managed cloud data warehouse and a long-standing incumbent for enterprise analytics. Starburst federates queries against Redshift via PrivateLink while competing for the same data warehouse modernization deals.
Emerging players
- Confluent: Confluent is the commercial steward of Apache Kafka and a Starburst technology partner (Tableflow integration), but is increasingly expanding into data streaming tables and lakehouse-adjacent capabilities, creating partial overlap.
- Firebolt: Firebolt is a cloud data warehouse focused on high-concurrency, low-latency analytics. It overlaps with Starburst Galaxy's performance-oriented positioning for sub-second analytical workloads.
Market position
Strengths5 records
Weaknesses5 records
Competitive moat7 records
Key risks6 records
Key highlights7 records
Customer concentration
Starburst social profiles
Digital presenceStarburst financial estimates
Financial estimateRevenue estimate
Valuation estimate
Starburst leadership team
Management profileNumber of profiles
Profiles12 records
Starburst funding detail
Funding detailFunding overview
Funding rounds5 records
Investors9 records
Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →
Starburst M&A and investment
M&A and investmentM&A1 record
Investments
M&A and investment is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →
Frequently asked questions about Starburst
What does Starburst do?
Starburst builds and sells a Trino-based enterprise data lakehouse platform that federates query access across cloud, on-premises, and hybrid data sources without moving the data. It is delivered as Starburst Galaxy (fully managed SaaS on AWS, GCP, and Azure) and Starburst Enterprise (self-managed platform), with an AI-Ready Data Products context layer, AIDA conversational AI assistant, and an Icehouse (Apache Iceberg + Trino) architecture for regulated enterprise analytics and AI workloads.
Is Starburst a public or private company?
Starburst is a private company. It is classified as venture growth investor backed and is currently operating.
When was Starburst founded?
Starburst was founded in 2017. It employs 501 to 1,000 people.
Where is Starburst based?
Starburst is headquartered in Boston, United States, in the North America region.
How does Starburst make money?
Four revenue lines are on record. Starburst Galaxy usage-based subscription is the primary driver. The others are starburst Enterprise platform license, professional Services and managed / cloud-delivered service (Galaxy).
Who are Starburst's main competitors?
Direct peers on record are Databricks, Snowflake, Cloudera and Dremio. Broad incumbents are AWS Athena, Google BigQuery, Microsoft Azure Synapse / Fabric and Amazon Redshift. Emerging players are Confluent and Firebolt.
Does Starburst have an API?
Yes. Starburst exposes a REST API for Starburst Enterprise platform (SEP) cluster and operational management, plus a Model Context Protocol (MCP) query endpoint that lets external AI agents and assistants (including Claude Desktop) query governed data products with short-lived scoped credentials. PyStarburst is offered as a Python SDK/client library for building data applications against Starburst Galaxy. Public-facing tutorials cover the MCP integration with Claude Desktop. Documentation is hosted at docs.starburst.io. Developer documentation is at docs.starburst.io/starburst-rest-api.html.
What industry is Starburst in?
Starburst's product category is Data Lakehouse Platform. Its primary akta.pro industry code is HDAEABAB, Lakehouse Platforms, with a secondary code of HDAEABAD, Data Platform (Unified Data & Analytics) Suites. Its NAICS code is 5182 and its SIC code is 7372.