From Day One — CRV’s Early-Stage Investment in StarTree
By Max Gazor
CRV’s story with StarTree started in 2019, when I first met founder Kishore Gopalakrishna in a market diligence exercise. Kishore had an illustrious career at LinkedIn, where he was the driving force behind Apache Pinot and a number of other popular open source data infrastructure projects. Today StarTree announced $24 million in Series A funding.
In my first meeting with Kishore, he struck me as soft-spoken but intensely curious. He asked searching questions around how founders start their companies, and over many sessions we mutually grew more excited about starting a new company together. We whiteboarded and scoped out the initial ideas for what would become StarTree. Kishore’s vision was more than just Apache Pinot (a distributed OLAP store that was used at LinkedIn, Uber and other web scale companies). His vision for StarTree was to build the market leading real-time data platform that companies of all sizes could leverage.
Kishore fit the pattern of many great engineers I’ve worked with in my career — curious, confident and collaborative. In late 2019, CRV funded the Series Seed in StarTree, and within a few months, Kishore and co-founder Xiang Fu started assembling one of the very best distributed systems engineering teams I’ve seen in my career.
As the StarTree team continued to assemble and Pinot’s Slack community grew past one thousand members in 2020, one major reference customer after another started deploying Pinot after comprehensive competitive analysis and benchmarking. The scale of these Pinot deployments made them some of the largest on earth, and the customer feedback was effusive. Investors noticed, and StarTree raised its Series A led by our friends Enrique Salem Bain Capital Ventures and Glenn Solomon GGV Capital. Enrique and Glenn bring decades of enterprise and open source experience to the board of StarTree, and we couldn’t ask for better partners to navigate this next phase of the journey.
CRV is a proud investor in StarTree, having backed the company from day one. It’s been an incredible journey thus far, and we are just getting started! StarTree is going to change the real-time analytics world, and we at CRV are excited to be a part of it. Congrats to the entire StarTree team on today’s exciting funding announcement.
