StarTree Cloud (Apache Pinot)

StarTree Inc., headquartered in Mountain View, California, was founded in 2021 by Kishore Gopalakrishna and Xiang Fu, the engineers who created Apache Pinot at LinkedIn. The company provides a managed real-time analytics engine for user-facing and operational applications that need sub-second answers on fresh data at high concurrency.

StarTree Cloud runs a dedicated Apache Pinot cluster per customer, consuming events directly from Kafka and querying lakehouse tables in Iceberg, Delta Lake and Parquet without copying them. Indexes, upserts, tiered storage and autoscaling keep latency low at thousands of queries per second, while ThirdEye adds anomaly detection and an MCP server exposes data to AI agents. Customers named on the site include Uber, Stripe, Walmart, Citi, CrowdStrike, DoorDash and Angel One.

• Streaming ingestion: Consumes Kafka topics directly without a separate micro-batch service.
• Rich indexing: Inverted, range, sorted, JSON, geospatial and vector indexes for fast filtering.
• Iceberg and Delta tables: Low-latency queries on lakehouse data without ETL or duplication.
• Upserts and tiered storage: Handles mutable records and moves older data to cheaper storage.
• ThirdEye: Anomaly detection and root-cause analysis on business metrics.
• AI access: MCP server and vector auto-embedding let AI agents query real-time data.

A Vietnamese securities company can show investors live portfolio and order analytics inside its trading app. An e-commerce or ride-hailing platform can give merchants and drivers real-time performance dashboards. A bank can monitor transaction metrics with ThirdEye anomaly alerts to spot outages or fraud spikes quickly.

Product teams can serve live dashboards and in-app analytics to many users with sub-second latency, the site citing workloads above 10,000 queries per second. Querying Iceberg or Delta tables in place avoids extra ETL and duplicate storage, and the vendor claims an average 15x lower cost per query than alternatives in its own benchmark. Managed SaaS, BYOC and on-premise Kubernetes options let regulated firms keep data in their own environment, backed by 24x7 support.

Digital banks, brokerages, food delivery and e-commerce platforms increasingly expose analytics directly to customers and operators, which requires fresh data and very high query concurrency. At the same time, enterprises are standardizing on open lakehouse formats such as Iceberg and want to serve them without copying data, a pattern also emerging among fast-growing digital businesses in Southeast Asia.

StarTree Inc. was founded in 2021 by the creators of Apache Pinot and is headquartered at 331 Castro St, Mountain View, California. It raised a 47 million USD Series B in 2022. The platform is SOC 2 and ISO 27001 compliant and is sold through AWS, GCP and Azure marketplaces.