Starting 2021 with a $100 million round of funding is the kind of exciting news that’s hard for a company to top. But Starburst is trying to do exactly that this year.
Just ask Anu Sudarsan. The software engineer and co-founder of the data analytics startup, a SQL-based MPP query engine which provides “a single point of access to all data” to clients for faster and easier decision-making, is budgeting for a blockbuster year that will involve doubling the size of the engineering team and supporting a brand new product, Starburst Galaxy.
Starburst’s latest offering, which was released in early May on AWS Marketplace, is a fully managed cloud-native offering that will allow users to easily access data across a variety of sources, Sudarsan said, adding that it’s not just the product that excites her — it’s what the product signifies.
“With Starburst Galaxy, we are hoping to expand to a broader market,” Sudarsan said, referring to the tool’s ability to help organizations without the internal resources, technical skills or bandwidth to quickly and easily take control of their data analytics. “And that means hiring more engineers.”
The company’s growth is certainly not a new phenomenon, as Sudarsan has seen Starburst triple its headcount in the past 12 months.
Sudarsan, who is the team lead for Starburst Galaxy, plays a very active role in the hiring process, so Built In Boston spoke with her to learn more about the engineering culture at Starburst, and what she’s most looking forward to in 2021.
Tell me the founding story behind Starburst.
Prior to Starburst, I had worked with the rest of our founding engineers and with the leadership team, at Hadapt (which got acquired by Teradata). Hadapt was our first attempt at selling an interactive SQL-on-Hadoop query engine. We learned a lot of lessons together, and thought about how we could do Hadapt differently. We evaluated Trino and other open-source projects, evaluating factors such as performance benchmarks, the community behind the project, code quality, SQL support etc. Being a high-performance MPP SQL-based query engine, Trino was a clear winner here. Particularly interesting was the fact that Trino was not just SQL-on-Hadoop, but SQL-on-any-datasource.
Our company was founded in an unusual way; with customers and revenue from the beginning and no VC backup. Our entire team had great confidence in the product.’’
In 2017, we decided to launch Starburst with the idea of making Trino more connective, secure and enabling enterprise-level support. It was built to provide a single point of secure access to all your data, and provide the tools to connect to all of your underlying data sources so you can access the data directly. Our company was founded in an unusual way; with customers and revenue from the beginning and no VC backup. Our entire team had great confidence in the product.
What’s a recent project you’ve worked on?
I’ve led the projects for bringing Starburst to Google Cloud Marketplace and Azure Cloud Marketplace. With these projects, Starburst is now available for all major cloud providers including AWS, Red Hat Openshift, Azure Cloud and Google Cloud. These projects also helped the team to grow partnership relationships with Microsoft and Google.
‘AHEAD IN THE GAME’
What’s on the horizon at Starburst?
I am most excited about our fully managed cloud-native offering, Starburst Galaxy. We announced the public beta release of the product early this year. With Galaxy, in just a few clicks, users have access to data across a variety of sources, making data instantly actionable. It decreases the time-to-insight with production-ready Trino, built-in security and it has an easy-to-use interface. With Starburst’s recent $100 million funding round that launched the company to a $1.2 billion valuation, and with Starburst Galaxy, we are hoping to expand to a broader market.
The company continues to develop Starburst Enterprise and has doubled down on connectivity, performance and security through many significant feature updates. Additionally, the availability of Starburst Insights, a web application for cluster and query reporting, provides a holistic view of performance and usage across the entire Starburst and Trino environment. Starburst launched the Orbit program to build a clear direction of working with our partner ecosystem and to accelerate customer success. With these new product launches and program offerings, we are confident that Starburst will reach more organizations than ever.
As part of the engineering team, I’m excited about our plans to double the size of our team this year.’’
What do the growth prospects look like for Starburst in 2021 and beyond?
We tripled our headcount in the last 12 months, and in the same span, our customers and channel partners doubled. While Starburst was a European-American company to start, with many co-founders based in Poland, Starburst invested in building out a go-to-market function based in the United Kingdom. We are also looking to add an Asia-Pacific hub staffed with sales professionals and customer support. As part of the engineering team, I’m excited about our plans to double the size of our team this year. If you’re a workhorse and want to be involved in the Starburst journey, check out our open roles!
