Starburst, one of Built In’s startups to watch in Boston this year, announced it raises a $250 million Series D round on Wednesday. The round brings Starburst’s valuation to $3.35 billion — over three times more than the company’s last valuation in January of 2021 when it became a unicorn.
The Series D was led by Alkeon Capital with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue Management, Index Ventures and Salesforce Ventures.
CEO Justin Borgman told Built In via email that the round was preempted.
“Investors came to Starburst expressing interest due to rapid cloud market growth and companies embracing a decentralized approach to data,” Borgman said.
In 2021, Starburst tripled its global customer base and employee headcount. Although the company has reached unicorn status, Borgman often compares Starburt’s progress to a “workhorse” rather than the fictional animal.
Following the workhorse mentality and tremendous growth, Starburst’s latest funding round will go also toward “ramp[ing] up operations to meet the industry’s growing demand for faster analytics on decentralized data,” according to a release. The raise additionally brings plans to expand into Asia.
The company is also hiring for nearly 100 roles in Boston and remotely. Starburst also plans to use the funding to double its employee headcount from 350 to nearly 700.
Starburst’s data analytic technology helps customers like Zillow, Priceline, Netflix and Twitter provide fast access to data without the company having to store the data itself.
“Starburst is a core part of the foundation of our data and analytics strategy at Priceline,” Sachin Menon, senior director of data at Priceline, said in a release. “We’ve been able to accelerate time-to-insight while reducing our storage costs by accessing it through Starburst.”
