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Starburst — Query Engines · fobi

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Starburst

Starburst commercializes Trino, an open-source distributed SQL query engine that federates queries across disparate data sources. Raised $250M Series D at $3.35B valuation in 2022. Trino is the query engine behind many data lake platforms. Competes with Dremio.

The leading Trino vendor enabling lakehouse queries without data movement, critical for open table format adoption and data mesh architectures.

starburst.io Query Engines

United Statesprivate

At a glance

Total raised

$350M

last round series d

Headcount

501-1k

approximate · public range

Headquarters

Boston

United States

Founded

2017

9 years active

Status

Private

Query Engines

Latest valuation

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Date	Stage	Amount	Valuation	Lead investors
Feb 9, 2022	Series D	$250M	$3.4B	Alkeon Capital Management
Jan 1, 2021	Series C	$100M	—

AI bull / bear

Bull case

Starburst sits on the trono of the fastest-growing architectural shift in data — the open lakehouse. Trino is the de facto open-source query engine for data lakes, powering federation across Iceberg, Delta Lake, Hudi, and dozens of other sources without moving data. As enterprises adopt data mesh and multi-engine architectures, Trino's flexibility becomes table-stakes infrastructure, not a nice-to-have. Starburst has raised $250M at a $3.35B valuation, giving it the war chest to build enterprise features — security, cost-based optimization, governance integrations — that the open-source project alone cannot deliver. Its customer roster includes many of the Fortune 500, and the shift away from vendor lock-in (Snowflake, Databricks) plays directly into Starburst's federated, open-core narrative. Every new company adopting Iceberg or Polaris creates another potential Starburst customer. The trunk is strong; the branch network is only expanding.

Bear case

Starburst monetizes an open-source engine that hyperscalers can offer for free. Amazon Athena and EMR already run Trino under the hood; Google and Azure are integrating it natively. Why pay Starburst when the same engine is available zero-margin inside your cloud bill? Meanwhile, Dremio has built a materially faster query engine with Apache Arrow and Sonar, winning performance benchmarks that matter to production workloads. Databricks Photon and Snowflake's native engine keep getting cheaper and faster, shrinking the performance gap that federation vendors rely on. The $3.35B valuation from 2022 was set at market peak — down rounds have hit every data infrastructure company that raised in that window. Starburst has no reported recent funding, which suggests either self-sufficiency or a stalled fundraising environment. If cloud vendors commoditize Trio connectivity and open table formats become standard (eliminating the federation wedge), Starburst's value proposition erodes to support and consulting margins.

Generated by deepseek-v4-flash · June 2, 2026Refreshes quarterly · see disclosures

Starburst

At a glance

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Funding history

How they make money

Founder backgrounds

Justin Borgman

Kamil Bajda-Pawlikowski

Matt Fuller

AI bull / bear

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Leadership

Products

Starburst Galaxy

Starburst Enterprise

Starburst AI Agent

Open roles

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