StarTree Inc., a startup commercializing the open-source Apache Pinot data analytics platform, today announced that it has secured $47 million in a new funding.

The Series B funding round follows a $24 million Series A investment that StarTree announced last May. GGV Capital, one of the participants in last year’s investment, led the startup’s latest raise. Sapphire Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures and CRV contributed as well.

StarTree commercializes Apache Pinot, an open-source platform created by the startup’s founders that helps companies build user-facing analytics features. A user-facing analytics feature is a section of an application’s interface that enables users to interact with data. A restaurant management application, for example, might include an interface section that provides data on how much revenue a restaurant generated in the past week.

Building user-facing analytics features involves a different set of requirements than a typical enterprise analytics project.

The first requirement is the ability to support a large number of users. If an application has millions of users, then its user-facing analytics features must be capable of delivering data to millions of devices. In contrast, most enterprise analytics projects are designed to deliver business insights to a limited number of decision-makers within a company.

Another requirement that user-facing analytics features must meet is the ability to provide low latency. Consumer applications are expected to load quickly and, consequently, their user-facing analytics features must load quickly as well. In some cases, that requires providing latencies as low as a few milliseconds.

StarTree says that Pinot combines low latency with the ability to support a large number of users. The platform can ingest data from a company’s internal systems in a fraction of a second and then stream it to an application’s user-facing analytics tools. Using Pinot, a company can enable its users to not only access data but also analyze it directly through an application’s interface.

Pinot lends itself to other types of software projects as well. According to StarTree, companies can use the platform to build internal analytics dashboards that track business metrics in real time. Pinot’s ability to analyze large amounts of data is also useful for detecting notable events, such as a sudden jump in sales at one of a company’s stores.

According to StarTree, Pinot is proving increasingly popular in the enterprise. The platform is used by Microsoft Corp., Cisco Systems Inc. and many other other tech companies. StarTree says that developers downloaded the platform about 950,000 times from 2010 to 2021.

“Such explosive growth within a short time period proves the need for the delivery of real-time analytics with low latency at scale,” said StarTree co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Kishore Gopalakrishna. “With the new technology and services we’re building on top of Apache Pinot, we’re opening the door for any company to extract intelligence that enables their customers, partners and employees to take action based on the freshest data and insights.”

StarTree sells a commercial, cloud-based version of Pinot called StarTree Cloud. The offering provides features that make the platform easier to use for enterprises. StarTree Cloud reduces the amount of manual work involved in creating a Pinot environment, automatically applies updates and provides cybersecurity features not provided by the open-source version.

Since its launch, StarTree Cloud has been adopted by Stripe Inc., publicly traded food delivery provider Just Eat Takeaway.com N.V and a number of other companies. StarTree will invest in new sales and marketing initiatives following its latest $47 million funding round to continue growing its customer base.

StarTree’s growth plan also includes other elements. The startup will open an office in India and intends to accelerate its product development roadmap. As part of the effort, StarTree expects to significantly grow its 70-person team through the end of 2023.

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