Data analytics startup StarTree secures funding to expand its Apache Pinot-powered platform

StarTree, a company building what it describes as an "analytics-as-a-service" platform, announced today that it has raised $47 million in a Series B funding round led by GGV Capital with participation from Sapphire Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures and CRV. In an email interview, co-founder and CEO Kishore Gopalakrishna said proceeds will be used to double StarTree's staff size (from 70 to 150 by 2023), expand overseas opening an office in India and generally working on R&D and product development.

Open source data analytics technologies are powerful indeed, able to drive both user-facing and enterprise-facing features, like a social media sidewall that shows members who view their profiles. But deploying and operating them can take a lot of engineering effort. Perhaps that's why a 2021 survey of leaders by MIT Technology Review Insights and Databricks found that only 13% of organizations were implementing their data analytics strategies.

Gopalakrishna says he co-launched StarTree in hopes of streamlining the process. Gopalakrishna and Xiang Fu – StarTree's other co-founder – were previously engineers at Uber and LinkedIn, where they created Apache Pinot, a low-latency analytics database that started as an internal LinkedIn project. Gopalakrishna says Pinot, which can analyze large amounts of data in different formats and from different streaming data sources, is now used in production by companies such as Microsoft, Uber and Factual.

"We saw first-hand the benefits of providing real-time insights to LinkedIn users and UberEats customers - restaurateurs and consumers - and we wanted to bring that to the rest of the world," Gopalakrishna told TechCrunch by email. "While it was obvious that every business could gain a competitive advantage by providing information to its customers and business partners, technology was a limiting factor."

StarTree manages Pinot and provides a Pinot-powered managed service that supports batch and streaming data. With Pinot, businesses have the ability to track things like inventory changes, provide real-time information, and respond to changes in demand for their products.

Image credits: StarTree

According to Gopalakrishna, one of the most powerful capabilities of the StarTree platform is that it can run the data plane (i.e. the part of the network that carries traffic) either in the a customer's cloud account or in the StarTree account. This gives customers the flexibility to choose the configuration that works best for them, he says, without having to compromise on security or governance and while offloading operations to StarTree.

"Many companies realize that the best way to extract the full potential of the data they collect is to use data applications. These applications can be for their customers or even for internal users. Pinot [and StarTree are] a critical part of this data application strategy," Gopalakrishna said. "StarTree's mission is to democratize data for all users, as it enables businesses of all sizes to take advantage of user-facing analytics to provide real-time insights to their customers and business partners to increase engagement and revenue."

StartTree recently launched a tiered storage service and bring-your-own-cloud and software-as-a-service editions of StarTree Cloud, the latter two of which provide Pinot clusters coupled with managed services and applications from StarTree. The company has also rolled out a community edition of its flagship software, including an application for real-time anomaly detection, monitoring and root cause analysis.

“Technologies such as Pinot enable businesses to gain real-time information about events and take immediate action. This can help businesses to...