Starburst secures $100M series C financing

Data virtualization and data-lake-focused Starburst is announcing a $100 million Series C funding round today. The round brings the three-year-old company's total funding to $164 million and, the company says, brings its valuation to $1.2 billion. The round is led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Salesforce Ventures, as well as existing investors Coatue and Index Ventures.

Also read: Starburst Data announces $42 million series B funding round

Starburst's platform is an enterprise-ready distribution deriving from the open source Presto project. Presto was created at Facebook and, as of September 22, 2020, all four of its creators are now on the Starburst team (three were Starburst co-founders and the fourth recently joined). While the group's "fork" of Presto was originally called PrestoSQL, the project was recently renamed Trino, in response to Facebook's trademarking of the Presto name. A blog post, just authored on December 27th, provides further background information on the name change and the ecosystem momentum of Trino versus Presto.

Also read: Ahana gets seed funding, and a tale of two Prestos

Starburst traces its lineage to an earlier company, also founded by Starburst CEO Justin Borgman, called Hadapt. Hadapt, which had some of the earliest SQL-on-Hadoop technology, had its assets acquired by Teradata in 2014, and was subsequently spun off as Starburst in December, 2017. With the spinoff, Starburst shifted away from Hadoop and towards the data source-agnostic Presto technology.

Also read: Teradata's Hadoop dreams lead to two company acquisitions

Starburst's funding announcement, along with that of Dremio earlier today, brings the day's take for the data lake camp to $235M for two companies whose self-reported combined valuations total $2.2B. Clearly, investors see merit in the data lake model and think it can compete handily with the cloud data lake approach of Wall Street darling Snowflake.

Also read: Data lake-focused Dremio raises $135M series D funding round