Highlights:

  • StarTree had previously raised USD 4 million in seed funding and USD 24 million in Series A fundraising in May 2021 and November 2019, respectively.

StarTree, Inc., the real-time analytics platform, recently announced USD 47 million in Series B funding. The company said it would use the funds to accelerate product development, increase sales and marketing, and drive fast adoption of its real-time analytics platform. Series A investor GGV Capital served as the round’s driving force. existing investors CRV and Bain Capital Ventures as well as new investor Sapphire Ventures, too, pitched in. To date, StarTree has raised a total of USD 75 million.

Original creators of Apache Pinot, the real-time distributed OLAP data store proven at scale by LinkedIn, Cisco, DoorDash, Etsy, Hyundai, Razorpay, 7-Eleven, Target, Uber, Walmart, Microsoft and many other data-driven leaders, founded StarTree. Since its debut in the spring of 2021, StarTree has accelerated at an unprecedented rate, fueled by the rising need for real-time analytics to power both enterprise and user-facing analytics products. Apache Pinot downloads increased by almost 20X from 50,000 in 2020 to one million in 2021 the previous year. Additionally, the Apache Pinot open-source Slack community has scaled 30X from 100 to about 3,000 members.

“We are seeing companies across a wide variety of industries recognize the value of providing real-time user-facing analytics at scale to their customers,” said Glenn Solomon, managing partner of GGV Capital and StarTree board member. “The challenge and opportunity lies in implementation, and StarTree makes it easy for companies of all sizes to build user-facing data applications. We’ve also seen open-source technology become mainstream in the enterprise space. Open-source companies live and die by the strength of their developer community, and the StarTree user community is fervent, loyal, and growing rapidly. The combination of an industry-leading real-time analytics platform and the strength of their community will propel StarTree to become the next great open source-based software company.”

“We’re frankly amazed and humbled by how the community has embraced Apache Pinot and StarTree,” said Kishore Gopalakrishna, co-founder and CEO of StarTree. “Such explosive growth within a short time period proves the need for the delivery of real-time analytics with low latency at scale. With the new technology and services we’re building on top of Apache Pinot, we’re opening the door for any company to extract intelligence that enables their customers, partners and employees to take action based on the freshest data and insights.”

StarTree had previously raised four million dollars in seed funding and USD 24 million in Series A fundraising in May 2021 and November 2019, respectively. Leaders in technology and industry leaders from Confluent, DataStax, DoorDash, GitHub, LinkedIn, and Redis Labs are among the early investors in StarTree.

StarTree intends to use the additional funding to considerably increase its workforce by the end of 2023 and expand internationally by breaking ground on a new facility in India. StarTree has achieved considerable commercial growth over the last 18 months, which includes:

  • Expanding its workforce from 12 to 70 personnel, including seasoned executives in product management, engineering, marketing, technical support, and developer relations.
  • Continually introducing new products, such as the fully managed cloud service StarTree Cloud, its BYOC and SaaS editions, and its Community Edition, which includes StarTree Data Manager for advanced no-code data management and StarTree ThirdEye for real-time anomaly detection, monitoring, and root-cause analysis.
  • Increasing the number of enterprise clients it serves, including Stripe, Guitar Center, Pluto TV, Blinkit, StreetMetrics, Tribe, and JustEatTakeaway.com.

Experts’ Take

“Cisco Webex is a critical service for millions of users worldwide who rely on us for meetings and calls.” said Sachin Joshi, Senior Director of Engineering at Cisco Webex. “On average, we support over 650 million participants, 30 billion meetings, and 8 billion calls on a monthly basis on the Webex platform. In addition we also have over 45 million cloud calling users. Apache Pinot’s speed and ease of use have enabled Webex to meet ever increasing demands with many of these workloads — and to accelerate the rollout of new customer experiences powered by real-time analytics.”

“With StarTree Cloud powering commerce and advertising analytics at Sovrn, our publishers can get revenue and click performance in real-time, helping track engagements at a granular level and grow their business,” said Ryan Chichirico, Vice President, Applications Engineering at Sovrn. “Pinot delivered on our real-time analytics needs and has been a game changer to onboard more data and applications across additional use cases. StarTree’s hosted Pinot service gives us unbelievable query performance for our datasets at a fraction of the cost.”

“As business data volumes grow exponentially, the universe of compelling use cases for real-time analytics has grown in lockstep,” said Casber Wang, partner at Sapphire Ventures. “Leveraging the momentum and community adoration of open-source Apache Pinot, StarTree is building into an exciting secular shift, as real-time analytics becomes an essential new tool for companies to provide data insights at scale to their customers, partners and employees. Kishore, Xiang and team have built a stellar product and user community in a short time, and we are excited to join them on the next leg of their journey.”