Justin Borgman’s head isn’t in the clouds. Not entirely, at least. The Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of data lakehouse company Starburst has focused the 8-year-old company’s solutions on both cloud and on-premise information technology – and that foresight is paying off. “If anything,” Borgman said in a recent interview, “there’s renewed enthusiasm in on-prem data centers because of the AI factor.”
As companies seek to train AI with enterprise data, Starburst is in the position to help them do just that. Its Lakeside AI product is designed to help “large, regulated” companies innovate with their own private data, and the Street is taking note: In May, Starburst received a strategic investment from Citi, cementing its status as an industry leader. It currently works with 10 of the top 15 banks in the world.
Borgman has come a long way from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he graduated with a degree in computer science and mathematics. After working as a software engineer for Raytheon and senior software engineer at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, he enrolled at Yale’s business school, from which he graduated in 2009.
That’s when Borgman began striking out on his own, co-founding Hadapt, the industry’s first Big Data analytic platform natively integrating SQL and Apache Hadoop. Four years later, Hadapt was acquired by Teradata, where Borgman would serve as Vice President and General Manager, where he was responsible for the company’s portfolio of Hadoop-related products, most notably open-source SQL query engine Presto.
Then, in 2017, he founded Starburst alongside the team that worked on Presto. To date, the company has raised more than $400 million, including a $250 million Series D raise in 2022. The combination of funding and institutional intelligence has allowed Borgman and team to create “more than just good models,” he said, helping organizations “reduce time-to-value while maintaining security and compliance.” It sounds simple, but it isn’t.
He just makes it so.