Federated data access and context are the new requirements for AI as Starburst sees 82% growth in the highly regulated financial services sector

Starburst, a leader in data and AI platforms, today announced that it surpassed $100 million in annual recurring revenue last year, reaching a $20 million AI annual run rate and delivering nearly 40% year-over-year growth.

These milestones signal something bigger than revenue growth. They mark the end of the dashboard era. Enterprises are no longer optimizing for better business intelligence pipelines. They are rebuilding for AI, and AI does not wait for pipelines to be built or data to be moved. On the strength of Starburst’s new AI capabilities, the company signed multiple eight-figure enterprise deals, doubled its business outside of the US, and grew its financial services business 85% year over year.

“For the past decade, the industry pushed a single idea: move all your data into one platform, centralize first, analyze later. That model was built for BI. AI changes the rules,” said Justin Borgman, Founder and CEO of Starburst. “Companies can’t unlock AI productivity gains with a data strategy designed for dashboards. They need a federated context layer that connects distributed data, governance, and business meaning into a single AI-ready foundation. That’s what Starburst delivers. And with AIDA, we’re bringing that foundation directly to the business user, transforming governed, federated data into an intelligent, conversational interface for the enterprise."

“Much of our growth this year has been fueled by large, complex financial institutions racing towards AI for fraud detection, customer service and risk management,” said Steven Chung, president of Starburst. “These banks have seen that Starburst enables them to achieve AI outcomes faster than ever before, and existing BI and analytics tools are being displaced with Starburst AI at scale.”

Starburst continues to demonstrate strong market momentum across a variety of industries with 130% net dollar retention and nearly 40% year-over-year growth in ARR, including exceptional 70% growth in EMEA. The company has established particular strength in financial services, achieving roughly 85% year-over-year growth in this sector and securing relationships with four of the top five banks in the Americas and seven of the top ten banks in EMEA. This traction underscores Starburst's position as the trusted data context layer for enterprise AI in highly regulated, data-intensive industries.

Additionally, Starburst is advancing its core platform to power production-grade, agentic AI at scale. The Starburst Agent can be deployed even in airgapped and highly regulated environments, enabling secure AI access without forcing data movement. Starburst is expanding its federated data products and business semantic layer, and advancing interoperability through its engagement with Open Semantic Interchange (OSI), to ensure AI systems operate on consistent, shared business context. At the same time, Starburst continues to enhance engine performance to support the higher concurrency and query volumes generated by AI agents, while driving cost-efficient performance through continued innovation in Apache Iceberg. Together, these investments position Starburst as the intelligence layer for enterprise AI.

Customers, investors and analysts weigh in on why Starburst is the essential data foundation for Enterprise AI:

“As a strategic investor in Starburst, we are confident in their vision of enabling federated data access for enterprise AI," said Siris Singh, Managing Director and Global Head of Markets Strategic Investments at Citi. "In an industry where data access and governance are paramount, Starburst's approach eliminates the need for costly, risky data migrations while accelerating AI initiatives at scale. This partnership allows us to innovate at the intersection of technology and financial services, and we're excited to support Starburst as they continue to grow and set the standard for AI-ready data infrastructure."

"An exascale AI factory is a high-performance machine where scale and sustainability are interdependent; power, cooling, and compute must operate in perfect harmony to be truly efficient. That level of synchronicity requires a data foundation that scales without compromise. By unifying IT and OT data through Starburst, Switch creates the connective tissue needed to drive agentic automation, ensuring we operate with absolute trust and maximum resource efficiency in real time,” said Zia Syed, Chief Technology Officer, Switch.

“Crossing $100 million in ARR underscores that federated data access is moving to a mainstream requirement for enterprise AI,” said Stephen Catanzano, Senior Analyst at Omdia. “As organizations move beyond traditional BI toward AI-driven decision-making, especially in regulated industries, the ability to query and govern data in place is becoming foundational. Starburst’s growth in financial services reflects a broader market reality: enterprises want AI outcomes without the risk, cost, and latency of large-scale data movement.”

Starburst continues to expand its strategic partnerships with leading enterprise technology providers, including tier-1 storage providers Dell, NetApp, and Pure Storage, to deliver comprehensive data platform solutions. Dell offers a comprehensive Dell AI Data Platform powered by Starburst. NetApp has recently announced the integration of Starburst into NetApp’s AI Data Engine (AIDE) in order to support AI-ready data infrastructure. Starburst is a key contributor to the Snowflake-led Open Semantic Interchange (OSI). Starburst is advancing open, vendor-neutral standards that eliminate semantic fragmentation, preserve shared business meaning across the data ecosystem, and accelerate AI adoption from experimentation to production-ready deployments.

To learn more, please check out Starburst’s infographic and read Justin Borgman’s blog post here.

About Starburst

Starburst is a leader in federated data and the foundation for enterprise AI, built for flexibility, delivering fast, secure access to all your data, wherever it lives. Whether on-premises, across clouds, or in hybrid environments, Starburst provides choice and control to your architecture. Built on an open data stack with Trino and Apache Iceberg, it unifies distributed data without complex or costly migrations, unleashing the full power of the data lakehouse for analytics and AI.

With our Lakeside AI architecture, enterprises gain federated access, governed collaboration, and full data lineage, laying the foundation for scalable, compliant AI innovation. Starburst empowers data-intensive and security-conscious organizations to unlock the full potential of their data while ensuring performance, governance, and control.

Enterprises in 60+ countries, including Comcast, Citigroup, and 4 of the top 5 global banks, rely on Starburst to power analytics and AI initiatives while maintaining flexibility and control. Our strategic partnerships with AWS, Dell Technologies, NetApp, and top cloud providers ensure seamless interoperability across environments.

From insights to action to AI, Starburst fuels innovation at every level. Learn more about AIDA, the AI Data Agent at https://www.starburst.io/info/ai-replace-bi/. Explore everything Starburst at starburst.ai.

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