New Funding to Capitalize on Apache Pinot and StarTree Company Momentum

StarTree, Inc. announced $47 million in Series B funding to accelerate product development, expand sales and marketing, and continue to drive fast adoption of its real-time analytics platform. The funding round was led by Series A investor GGV Capital, with additional investment from new investor Sapphire Ventures and existing investors Bain Capital Ventures and CRV. StarTree has raised a total of $75 million to date.

StarTree was founded by the 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. StarTree has experienced unprecedented momentum since launching in spring 2021, fueled by growing demand for real-time analytics to power both enterprise and user-facing analytics applications. Over the past year, Apache Pinot downloads grew nearly 20X from 50,000 in 2020 to one million in 2021. The Apache Pinot open source Slack community also grew 30X, from 100 members to nearly 3,000 members today.

“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.”

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StarTree plans to use the new funding to significantly increase its staff by the end of 2023 and expand overseas by breaking ground on a new location in India. Over the past 18 months, StarTree has generated significant business momentum including:

• Growing its team from 12 to 70 employees, including experienced leaders in product management, engineering, marketing, technical support and developer relations.
• Delivering consistent product innovation, including general availability of StarTree Cloud as a fully managed cloud service; delivery of bring-your-own-cloud and SaaS editions of StarTree Cloud; and delivery of a Community Edition including StarTree Data Manager for advanced no-code data management and StarTree ThirdEye for real-time anomaly detection, monitoring and root-cause analysis.
• Growing its enterprise customer base with the addition of Stripe, Guitar Center, Pluto TV, Blinkit, StreetMetrics, Tribe, and JustEatTakeaway.com among others.

“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.”

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