StarTree, a company building what it describes as an “analytics-as-a-service” enterprise, today announced it has raised $47 million in a Series B 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 the proceeds will be used to double Starttree’s workforce (from 70 to 150 people by 2023), break the office in India and generally expand overseas. On R&D and product development.
Open-source data analytics technologies can drive user and business-related features such as social media sidewalls to profile members. But they can require a lot of engineering effort to deploy and operate. That is why A 2021 MIT Technology Review and Databricks survey of executives found that 13 percent of organizations are outsourcing their data analytics strategy.
Gopalakrishna said he co-founded StarTree to streamline 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 began as an internal LinkedIn project. Gopalakrishna says Pinot, which can analyze huge amounts of data in different formats and from different streaming sources, is now being used for production by companies like Microsoft, Uber and Factual.
“We’ve seen firsthand the benefits of providing real-time insights for LinkedIn users and customers — restaurant owners and consumers — with UberEats and wanted to bring it to the next level,” Gopalakrishna told TechCrunch in an email. “It was clear that every company could gain a competitive advantage by providing insights to their customers and business partners, but technology was a limitation.”
StarTree hosts Pinot and is managed by a Pinot-powered service that supports batch and streaming. With Pinot, businesses have the ability to track things like inventory changes, provide real-time insights 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 the ability to run the data plane (ie, the network component that carries the traffic) within a customer’s cloud account or StarTree account. This allows customers to choose the configuration that works best for their customers without creating security or management issues and offloading operations to StarTree, he said.
“Many companies are realizing that the best way to unlock the full potential of the data they collect is through data applications. These applications can be for their customers or even internal users. Pinot [and StarTree are] A critical piece in that data application strategy,” Gopalakrishna said. “StarTree’s mission is to democratize data for all users, as it enables companies of all sizes to use user-centric 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 StartTree Cloud, the latter two of which offer Pinot suites with StarTree managed services and applications. The company released its Community Edition core software, including an application for real-time anomaly detection, monitoring and root cause analysis.
“Technologies like Pinot allow companies to gain real-time insights from events and take immediate action. This helps companies not only capitalize on changing trends but also act quickly to prevent further losses,” Gopalakrishna said. With Pinot and StarTree companies, you can immediately see how these preferences are changing and respond accordingly.
Gopalakrishna wouldn’t disclose the exact size of Startiri’s clientele, but said Guitar Center, Pluto TV, Strip and JustEatTakeaway.com are among its subscribers.
Competitors include unicorn startup Imply, Yandex-incubated ClickHouse and various other companies built on the technology, and Roxet. To fend off rivals, Gopalakrishna said a portion of the Series B proceeds — which bring the company’s total revenue to $75 million — will be used to expand StarTree’s sales and marketing team and introduce new self-service options.
“As adoption continues to grow … we’re seeing new feature requests from users to continue to grow every day,” Gopalakrishna said. “above all [with the funding, we] He can invest heavily in Apache Pinot and the community.
