The first local tech company of 2021 to hit unicorn status is an analytics startup with 12 co-founders and around 60 employees in Massachusetts.
Last week, three-year-old startup Starburst Data Inc. said it raised $100 million in a financing round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Salesforce Ventures. The raise, which brought the company's total funding to $164 million, came with a new valuation of $1.2 billion — surpassing the $1 billion threshold for the company to be considered a "unicorn."
But Justin Borgman, CEO of Boston-based Starburst, said in an interview that he prefers to think of his analytics company as more similar to a Clydesdale, a breed of heavy horses originated from Scottish farm horses.
"We like to think of ourselves as more of a workhorse," he said. "Unicorns aren't real, but a workhorse is."
The core technology of Starburst began as an open source project, which is why the startup has 11 co-founders. All the co-founders are still with the company in various roles and geographies, across California, Boston and Poland (where the company has a second office).
Starburst has its roots in SQL, the standard language used to interact with and get answers from databases. In fact, the company takes his name from the 'star,' or asterisk symbol, on the keyboard, which in SQL is a basic command to get all the data.
Enterprise data is traditionally stored in different databases, perhaps in Oracle or in the cloud. As a result, it can take a lot of time to get the data ready for analysis and, potentially, to be fed to machine learning algorithms to get data-driven predictions.
Starburst says that it doesn't need to store data to start the analysis or, more technically, query the data via SQL. "We access the data where it lives, which gives our customers the choice to decide where that data is going to be stored ... Regardless of where it is, we can access it and query it and deliver results," Borgman said.
As an example, Borgman points to Comcast Corp. (Nasdaq: CMCSA), one of Starburst's customers. The telecom provider stores information on the shows that customers watch in a database, while billing information goes into another system, according to Borgman. "If they want to correlate the shows that you watch with how much you spend, they need access to both sets of data, right? That's part of what our technology makes possible. Otherwise, you'd have to make copies of the data and move it from one system to another," he said.
Borgman said that Starburst is planning to use the new investment to hire over 100 people in Massachusetts over the next 12 months, across engineering, marketing, customer success and finance. The company now has over 200 employees worldwide, and is based at the Downtown Crossing's Workbar co-working space on School Street.
Borgman added he hopes to look for a dedicated office space in mid- or late-summer this year, depending on the ongoing pandemic. Starburst recently hired a number of salespeople in the U.K. and plans to do the same later this year in the Asia-Pacific region.
Massachusetts tech unicorns 2020
Valuation: $1 billion
Total funding: $422 million
Unicorn date: 05/06/2018
What it does: Low-code rapid application development software
HQ: Boston
Founding year: 2001
Valuation: $1 billion
Total funding: $263 million
Unicorn date: 02/13/2020
What it does: Financial services software
HQ: Boston
Founding year: 2009
Pictured: Mike Massaro (pictured) is CEO of Flywire
Valuation: $1 billion
Total funding: $388 million
Unicorn date: 08/05/2019
What it does: Endpoint security software
HQ: Boston
Founding year: 2012
Pictured: From left, Cybereason co-founders Yonatan Striem-Amit, CTO, Lior Div, CEO and Yossi Naar, chief visionary officer
10. Valuation: $1.053 billion
Total funding: $454.5 million
Unicorn date: 01/21/2020
What it does: Security software for developers
HQ: Boston
Founding year: 2015
Pictured: Guy Podjarny (left), founder and president of Boston-based Snyk, and Peter McKay, CEO
Valuation: $1.065 billion
Total funding: $103.2 million
Unicorn date: 08/01/2018
What it does: 3D printing
HQ: Somerville
Founding year: 2011
Pictured: The Formlabs printers are called Form 2, Form Wash and Cure
Valuation: $1.13 billion
Total funding: $318 million
Unicorn date: 03/06/2014
What it does: Data management, cloud backup and recovery
HQ: Waltham
Founding year: 2009
Pictured: Ash Ashutosh, founder and CEO of Actifio
Valuation: $1.2 billion
Total funding: $245 million
Unicorn date: 04/29/2015
What it does: Enterprise data and cloud storage software
HQ: Waltham
Founding year: 2011
Valuation: $1.25 billion
Total funding: $320 million
Unicorn date: 04/01/2019
What it does: Software for corporate catering
HQ: Boston
Founding year: 2007
Pictured: Stefania Mallett, co-founder and CEO of ezCater
Valuation: $1.26 billion
Total funding: $396.5 million
Unicorn date: 07/15/2020
What it does: The e-commerce company looks for top-reviewed products on sale on Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) and buys the brands from the third-party sellers. Then, it optimizes operations, taking care of branding and search
HQ: Walpole
Founding year: 2018
Pictured: Carlos Cashman, co-CEO and co-founder of Thrasio, started the company with fellow co-CEO and co-founder Joshua Silberstein
Valuation: $1.3 billion
Total funding: $431 million
Unicorn date: 09/17/2019
What it does: Artificial intelligence-based software for enterprise data analysis
HQ: Boston
Founding year: 2012
Pictured: The "Tech development area" at the office of DataRobot
Valuation: $1.4 billion
Total funding: $897 million
Unicorn date: 07/10/2018
What it does: Restaurant software
HQ: Boston
Founding year: 2011
Pictured: From left to right: Toast co-founder and president Steve Fredette; Toast CEO Chris Comparato; Toast co-founder and president Aman Narang; Toast co-founder and chief technology officer Jonathan Grimm
Valuation: $1.4 billion
Total funding: $1 billion and $116 million
Unicorn date: 12/06/2017
What it does: The agriculture-technology startup uses microbiology research to help farmers replace chemicals and fertilizers and increase crop yield
HQ: Boston
Founding year: 2013
Pictured: An Indigo grow room in Charlestown
