Starburst

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.

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

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

• Federated query engine
• Data lakehouse platform
• Enterprise analytics software
• Open table formats
• AI data products

Headquarters

HQ city

Boston

HQ country

United States

HQ region

North America

Offices1 record

Markets served

GTM type

B2B

Offering type

Software

Cost components

Personnel, Technology or R&D, Marketing or Sales, Infrastructure, Operations

Revenue model

1. 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.
2. 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).
3. Professional Services: Scoped-separately professional services, onboarding, and education offerings for enterprise deployments, plus scoped ongoing account management for premium support customers.
4. 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

Go-to-market motion5 records

Distribution channels6 records

Marketing channels13 records

Core 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

Named customers38 records

Segments8 records

Ideal customer profiles4 records

Technology focussed Yes

API detail

Has API

Yes

API docs

API detail

Core technology

AI maturity

App detail

Integration36 records

AI capability4 records

Feature10 records

Partnerships

17 partnerships are on record, tiered core, minor and flagship.

• QlikcoreStrategic or Co-development Partner · 4 June 2026Qlik 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.
• LeytonminorStrategic or Co-development Partner · 9 April 2026Starburst and Leyton joined forces to redefine deeptech innovation, leveraging Leyton's deeptech expertise alongside Starburst's data platform.
• Hays Caldwell Economic Development PartnershipminorGTM or Marketing Partner · 23 March 2026Starburst and Hays Caldwell Economic Development Partnership launched a startup incubator to support early-stage companies in the region.
• NVIDIAcoreTechnology or Integration · 16 March 2026Starburst 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.
• SnowflakecoreStrategic or Co-development Partner · 11 November 2025Starburst 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 TechnologiesflagshipStrategic or Co-development Partner · 21 October 2025Dell 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.
• ConfluentcoreTechnology or Integration · 25 March 2025Starburst 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.
• ElasticcoreTechnology or IntegrationElastic 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 HatcoreTechnology or IntegrationStarburst Enterprise supports deployment on Red Hat OpenShift, as documented in the official Starburst Enterprise deployment guide.
• Amazon Web Services (AWS)flagshipTechnology or IntegrationStarburst 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 AzurecoreTechnology or IntegrationStarburst 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 CloudcoreTechnology or IntegrationStarburst 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 projectflagshipTechnology or IntegrationStarburst 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.
• CloudflarecoreTechnology or IntegrationCloudflare 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)minorOthersSchellman is Starburst's ISO/IEC 27001 certification body and also conducts Starburst's SOC 2 Type 2 attestation.
• VeracodecoreTechnology or IntegrationVeracode 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)minorOthersDatadog 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

Direct 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

• Xx.com/starburstdata
• YouTubeyoutube.com/c/StarburstData
• Facebookfacebook.com/starburstdata
• LinkedInlinkedin.com/company/starburstdata
• Instagraminstagram.com/lifeatstarburst

Revenue estimate

Valuation estimate

Number of profiles

Profiles12 records

Funding overview

Funding rounds5 records

Investors9 records

Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

M&A1 record

Investments

M&A and investment is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

Frequently asked questions about Starburst