Starburst Hires Javier Molina as Chief Revenue Officer, Highlights Company Growth and Product Innovation

The appointment of former MongoDB sales leader highlights Starburst’s commitment to new self-service SaaS product Galaxy

Starburst, the analytics anywhere company, named Javier Molina as its Chief Revenue Officer. In this role, he will develop and oversee Starburst’s global sales strategy, accelerate company growth and revenue, and lead top-performing sales teams. Javier brings nearly 15 years of sales leadership experience to Starburst, most recently serving as the SVP of Worldwide Sales for Atlas, MongoDB’s extremely successful multi-cloud application data platform.

Javier’s appointment to the executive team is the latest example of Starburst’s impressive growth and commitment toward becoming a best-in-class SaaS company. Starburst has continued evolving into a cloud-first company through new product innovation, recently announcing the first cross-cloud analytics solution with the latest version of its SaaS product, Starburst Galaxy.

“Starburst is solving a critical challenge related to distributed data and data silos with an entirely new approach, and the latest iteration of Starburst Galaxy paves the way for Starburst to become the next OS company to capture the cloud,” said Molina. “With the release of Galaxy, we will look to accelerate the adoption of the power of Trino by removing the operational overhead of self-managing the open source. I’m looking forward to contributing to Starburst’s continued growth by building and leading its talented sales team as we provide the future of truly data-driven organizations across the globe.”

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Starburst’s recent research with Red Hat revealed that data access has become more critical for 53% of survey respondents throughout the pandemic, as analytics workloads and demands have significantly increased. With data volumes expected to climb at an annual growth rate of 19.2%, enterprises are also increasingly embracing the Data Mesh architecture, a new decentralized architectural approach that empowers end users to access and analyze data to drive faster, more impactful outcomes.

“I’m thrilled to welcome Javier to the Starburst family. Javier’s impressive track record of building the revenue engine for MongoDB’s wildly popular Atlas cloud product makes him a perfect fit for the role, particularly with the recent release of our Galaxy product now available on all three major public clouds,” said Justin Borgman, CEO and co-founder of Starburst. “At Starburst, we’re changing the way organizations think about analytics. By empowering data teams to embrace a Data Mesh architecture and deliver data as a product, we’re making data-driven decisions more accessible across the enterprise. Companies can finally perform data warehousing analytics, without the data warehouse.”

Starburst will mark the end of Q3 2021 with 3x YoY employee, customer, and annual recurring revenue (ARR) growth. On the heels of a $100 million Series C funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz earlier this year, Starburst expanded its customer base, including Align Technology, Ceridian, Apache Corporation, Standard Chartered Bank, and caseWare International. In 2021, Starburst also received several notable industry recognitions and honors including CRN’s Big Data 100, Women of the Channel Awards, “Data Access Solution of the Year” in the Data Breakthrough Awards, Solution Review’s “Coolest Data Analytics and Business Intelligence CEOs of 2021,” Intelligent Apps Top 40, and more.

“By deploying Starburst, we’ve reduced our time-to-insight from months to hours, strengthened our security, reduced costs by 40%, and increased our overall conversion rate by over 10%,” said Shen Wang, Principal Data Engineer at AssuranceIQ. “We’re now able to help our customers get the best insurance policies possible and our agents are more successful through more robust modeling.”

In February 2021, Starburst also hosted Datanova, its first two-day virtual user conference that gathered more than 3,000 attendees and industry leaders who discussed how to help enable data teams to get the most and best out of their data. Through follow-on Datanova conferences for Data Analysts, Data Scientists, and lastly Data Leaders, Starburst served over 6,000 attendees with best practices and training content spanning Trino, Starburst, and Data Mesh topics. On Feb. 9-10, 2022, the company will host its second annual Datanova conference, which will center around Data Mesh and feature a keynote from Steve Wozniak, Apple co-founder, innovator and engineer.

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Starburst’s recent highlights and milestones include:

Corporate Momentum

• Employee growth: Starburst grew employee headcount by 3x in the last 12 months. Other leadership hires in addition to Javier include Toni Adams as VP of Partner & Alliances, David Freeman as VP of Business Operations & Finance, and Adrian Estala, former Chief Data Officer at Shell, as Starburst’s VP, Data Mesh Consulting Services.
• Financing and investors: Starburst’s Series C funding round, led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Salesforce Ventures, brought the three-year-old company’s total financing to $164 million with a market valuation of $1.2 billion. This round made Starburst one of the fastest tech startups to reach unicorn status in the data and analytics space.

Product Leadership

• Launch of Starburst Galaxy: Starburst launched the public beta program for Starburst Galaxy, the industry’s first cross-cloud analytics solution that allows users to run interactive analytics across data sources in minutes—without painful data movement, data duplication or vendor lock-in.
• Starburst Enterprise Enhancements: In addition to connectivity, performance, and security updates, Starburst Enterprise now offers Starburst Insights, a web application for cluster and query reporting that provides a holistic view across the entire Starburst + Trino environment.
• Launch of Stargate: Starburst launched Stargate as an add-on for Starburst Enterprise, which enables organizations to run cross-cloud analytics on data distributed across the globe, and ensures compliance with global data sovereignty regulations.
• Investment in Data Mesh: Starburst’s roadmap is aligning to the Data Mesh architectural approach, with new features launching soon that allow for the creation and sharing of data products. Starburst also sponsored the upcoming O’Reilly book, “Data Mesh: Delivering Data-Driven Value at Scale” by Zhamak Dehghani, which has received more than eight thousand downloads in just two months.

Customer and Partner Excellence

• Customer growth: Starburst grew its global customer base by 3x in the last 12 months. With Starburst’s universal data access and analytics solutions, companies like Comcast, FINRA, Zillow and Condé Nast are making better and faster decisions on all of their data.
• Partner momentum: Starburst announced a partnership with Red Hat as one of the inaugural members of the Red Hat OpenShift Data Science ecosystem, and announced the availability of Starburst Enterprise Trino on Google Cloud Marketplace earlier this year. Starburst is now available on five major public and private cloud platforms, including AWS, Azure, GCP, Red Hat, and HPE.

Open Source Trino Community Growth

• Following the rebranding of PrestoSQL to Trino, the distributed SQL query engine community & code continues to flourish. Community members and engagement metrics have grown significantly: Slack members have grown 57%, Github stars have seen 157% growth, and YouTube subscribers have grown 206%. Companies such as Netflix, LinkedIn, Lyft, Nielsen, Shopify, Pinterest, Salesforce and more are playing a key role in Trino’s ongoing development.
• Starburst hosted the Inaugural Trino Summit. On October 20-21, Starburst welcomed over 1,000 attendees to the first Trino summit where user talks were given by Netflix, Doordash, Robinhood and more.