The road to AI runs through data. Justin Borgman, Founder and CEO of Starburst, built his company on that idea—after realizing most enterprises can’t fully use their data because it’s scattered across incompatible systems.
Borgman traces how “big data” evolved from the early days of Hadoop and MapReduce to today’s open data lakehouses. Starburst, built on the Trino engine and Apache Iceberg, gives companies the freedom to query and combine information wherever it lives—cloud, on-prem, or hybrid—without slow migrations or vendor lock-in.
Bootstrapped in its early years, Starburst grew deliberately, proving its model before raising capital. That foundation helped it become the data layer for global enterprises in finance, tech, and healthcare—organizations that rely on fast, secure access to power analytics and AI.
Data may have started the AI revolution, but progress still depends on how well we can access, organize, and understand it.