StarTree is a cloud-based software company that enables business customers to derive advanced insights from real-time and historical data. Pulse 2.0 interviewed StarTree co-founder and CEO Kishore Gopalakrishna to learn more about the company.
Kishore Gopalakrishna’s Background
What is Gopalakrishna’s background? Gopalakrishna said:
“My passion lies in solving complex problems in distributed systems, which led me to author projects like Apache Helix, a cluster management framework; Espresso, a distributed document store; and ThirdEye, a platform for anomaly detection and root cause analysis at LinkedIn. At LinkedIn, I also developed Apache Pinot, the real-time analytics datastore designed to deliver scalable and ultra-fast analytics. This creation quickly became a cornerstone for managing their complex workloads.”
Formation Of StarTree
How did the idea for the company come together? Gopalakrishna shared:
“After leaving LinkedIn, I joined a startup where I initially avoided using Pinot because I wanted to explore new technologies and learn about startups. While working for a stealth mode company, I needed a technology that could cater to real-time use cases. The alternatives (BigQuery, Mongo, Elastic) didn’t meet the company’s demanding requirements.”
“It became clear that only Pinot could handle these challenges. I realized I had built something truly special with Pinot, reinforcing my belief in its potential to revolutionize real-time analytics. Encouraged by my family’s unwavering support and the growing market need for real-time analytics, I decided to leverage my expertise in distributed systems and my successful track record with Pinot to start my own venture. Thus, in 2020, I co-founded StarTree with the mission of empowering businesses with real-time insights through the robust capabilities of Apache Pinot.”
Favorite Memory
What has been your favorite memory working for the company so far? Gopalakrishna reflected:
“While there are many memorable moments that come to mind, closing our first enterprise customer stands out as my favorite. This event was not just a significant milestone for our company but also a moment of immense pride and validation.”
“Securing that first enterprise customer gave us the confidence that we were building something truly valuable. It was a pivotal moment that reinforced our belief in the potential and impact of our solutions. Seeing a major organization recognize and invest in our capabilities was incredibly rewarding.”
“This achievement also set the stage for us to aim higher and push further.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Gopalakrishna explained:
“StarTree’s core products and features are centered around providing powerful real-time analytics solutions using Apache Pinot. StarTree Cloud is a fully managed service that offers seamless deployment, management, and scaling of Apache Pinot in the cloud. It provides organizations with self-service analytics capabilities, empowering teams to independently access and analyze real-time data without relying heavily on centralized data teams. This service ensures that businesses can leverage the power of real-time analytics with minimal operational overhead, making it easier to maintain and scale their analytics infrastructure as their data needs grow.”
“StarTree Cloud simplifies the integration of various data sources with Apache Pinot, supporting connectors for databases, data warehouses, and streaming platforms like Kafka. It enables high-throughput, low-latency data ingestion, ensuring that analytics are always up-to-date and reflecting the latest data. By streamlining data integration, StarTree Cloud allows businesses to quickly and efficiently bring their diverse data sets into Apache Pinot, facilitating more comprehensive and timely data analysis.”
“StarTree’s core features include fast query performance, scalability, and advanced querying capabilities, allowing for sub-second query performance on large-scale data sets and supporting complex aggregations, filtering, and joins. It integrates LinkedIn’s ThirdEye platform for built-in anomaly detection and root cause analysis, enabling proactive monitoring of key metrics and anomalies. Additionally, StarTree enables the creation of custom dashboards and visualizations for user-facing analytics, enhancing the user experience and allowing for interactive data exploration. Leveraging the open-source Apache Pinot project, StarTree benefits from a vibrant community and continuous innovation, positioning it as a leading provider of real-time analytics solutions.”
Challenges Faced
What challenges has Gopalakrishna and the team faced in building the company? Gopalakrishna acknowledged:
“We’ve encountered some challenges, particularly around raising awareness and understanding of real-time analytics. Initially, there were concerns about its necessity, value, and cost. To address these concerns, we decided to work closely with visionary leaders in various industries who were already exploring innovative solutions.”
“By collaborating with forward-thinking companies like Stripe, we were able to demonstrate the practical benefits of real-time analytics. Their success stories helped illustrate how real-time insights can drive better decision-making and operational efficiency.”
“Through these partnerships, we were able to provide concrete examples of the value real-time analytics can bring. This approach helped build trust and gradually shift perceptions, encouraging others to see the potential and benefits for themselves. By focusing on education and showcasing real-world applications, we managed to overcome the initial skepticism and highlight the transformative impact of real-time analytics.”
Evolution Of StarTree’s Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since launching? Gopalakrishna noted:
“Since our launch, StarTree’s technology has evolved significantly, focusing on enhancing real-time analytics through Apache Pinot. The introduction of the managed service StarTree Cloud has made deploying and managing Apache Pinot more accessible, while integrations with Apache Kafka have enabled seamless data streaming and real-time analytics. Advanced query capabilities, like query-time joins, and the adoption by major companies such as Uber and DoorDash, demonstrate StarTree’s effectiveness in handling large-scale, real-time data analytics, making it a robust solution for diverse industry applications.”
Customer Success Stories
After asking Gopalakrishna about customer success stories, he highlighted:
“LinkedIn created the Apache Pinot project with the use case of ‘Who viewed my profile?’ Other existing systems simply didn’t work for the problem they had at the scale they wanted to operate at. Over time Apache Pinot was foundational infrastructure to build many other applications within LinkedIn — for recruiting, sales, marketing, and so on.”
“Uber also became an early adopter of Apache Pinot. By moving to a designed-for purpose real-time analytics database, they finally achieved the performance they needed and saved $2 million annually in the process. Best of all, they didn’t sacrifice performance, they improved it: page load times dropped from 14 seconds to less than 5 seconds.”
“Cisco WebEx also found that moving to Apache Pinot provided subsecond latencies in most cases, whereas what they had been using was timing out at greater than 30 seconds two-thirds of the time. Moreover they were able to reduce the amount of data storage from over 800 terabytes to 121 terabytes, saving them greatly on their infrastructure spend.”
“Stripe also uses Apache Pinot across many functions, both internal and external user-facing analytics. User-facing applications include customer dashboards, billing and developer analytics, to Sigma reports. Internally they also use it for failure alerts, financial data reporting, risk monitoring, and access log security monitoring. Stripe depends on Apache Pinot for its Black Friday / Cyber Monday business, and last year tracked $18.6 billion in commerce and over more than 300 million transactions in that critical period of annual business.”
Significant Milestones
After asking Gopalakrishna about the company’s funding and other milestones, he revealed:
“What started with 18 people at Series A in 2021, over securing $47 million in Series B funding in 2022, has now grown into a team of over 100 highly motivated and talented individuals from around the world. This team is led by a world-class group of leaders who make up the pillars of our company’s foundation and saw some significant additions in 2023.”
“Today, StarTree powers hundreds of user-facing applications at companies, including LinkedIn, Uber, Target, Cisco, DoorDash, 7-Eleven, Etsy, Walmart and more. The Apache Pinot community grew from 100 to 4,500 members and from LinkedIn and Uber to more than 1,000 organizations across diverse sectors. We experienced exceptional growth in 2023, more than doubling customers and revenue; winning the Integration ISV Partner of the Year Award from Confluent alongside being a flagship Connect with Confluent partner; joining the AWS ISV Accelerate Program; and being invited to the AWS Global Startup Program. StarTree also announced a strategic investment from Citi in 2024.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Gopalakrishna affirmed:
“What differentiates StarTree from competitors is our ability to deliver scalable, real-time analytics tailored for user-facing applications, which has proven invaluable in current use cases such as Uber’s location-based services and DoorDash’s real-time order tracking. StarTree’s technology, powered by Apache Pinot, handles high concurrency and low latency demands, making it ideal for companies needing immediate insights from large data sets. Its seamless integration with Apache Kafka for real-time data ingestion further enhances its capability to provide instant, actionable analytics, which is a critical differentiator in industries requiring rapid decision-making and responsiveness.”
