Star Analytics Raises Series A

Last week, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Hummer Winblad announced the Series A funding of Star Analytics, a provider of financial data management solutions.

Star provides ETL software designed to bridge multi-dimensional and relational data and applications.

The company boasts 16 enterprise customers across key verticals and the A round represents the first paid-in-capital. The team is led by early members of the Hyperion team, also backed by Hummer Winblad.

The investment thesis is clear and the product offering unique relative a large pain point.

Pain Point in Market

1) Fortune 500 companies deploy OLAP-based planning and reporting applications (Hyperion, Cognos, and Business Objects)

2) Data in cubes is A) in proprietary data formats and B) is often largely dynamic (i.e. not persisted)

3) Access to the data requires the use of native client applications from said vendors

4) Corporate America is deploying standard, relational reporting and analytics applications for KPI, BPM, and financial reporting

5) Currently, these applications (Crystal, MicroStrategy, ORCL, SAP, MSFT) are not able to query or view the data trapped in cubes

6) Current solution involves professional services dollars to map OLAP to star schema data structures

Core Product

1) Extracts OLAP data into standard tables (data, metadata, security access controls)

2) Captures dynamic (non persisted) data

3) Manages synchronization – delta’s flagged and continuously exported to maintain consistency between source (OLAP) and target (RDBMS)

As enterprises seek to break data silos and ensure corporate wide access to unified and accurate data, barriers such as data structure, data source, and proprietary interfaces frustrate that goal.

Star breaks the shackles of proprietary data formats, connectivity, and unshared calculations and consolidations and allows for key financial data to by syndicated to business users and processes across the enterprise.

Congratulations to the team.