en.Wedoany.com Reported - U.S. enterprise intelligence platform Starburst announced on May 13 that its annual AI & Datanova conference is scheduled for May 27 to 28 at the Fontainebleau Miami Beach in Florida, with a virtual attendance option available simultaneously. The conference centers on the core theme of "Enterprise AI Data Foundation," confronting an emerging industry gap—most enterprises' data foundations were never built for AI.
Starburst Co-founder and CEO Justin Borgman will deliver a keynote address during the opening session, discussing why the shift from traditional business intelligence to enterprise-grade AI exposes fundamental deficiencies in underlying data architectures for most organizations, far beyond a mere technology upgrade. Borgman co-founded the SQL-on-Hadoop company Hadapt in 2010; after Hadapt was acquired by Teradata in 2014, he served as Vice President and General Manager at Teradata. In 2017, he officially founded Starburst, dedicated to enabling analysts to analyze datasets anywhere without moving data. In 2022, Borgman was named an Exceptional Entrepreneur of the Year by Goldman Sachs.
The conference speaker lineup spans multiple industries including technology, insurance, healthcare, finance, and hardware infrastructure. Technical leaders from NVIDIA, GEICO, Highmark Health, Citizens Bank, and Dell will share the governance and architecture challenges they face at the AI infrastructure level. Judging by the conference agenda, the bottleneck to scaling AI lies not in the models themselves, but in the data—data is severely fragmented across systems, lacks unified semantic definitions, and governance complexity increases exponentially with the number of data sources. Without consistent data context, AI systems cannot produce reliable results.
This assessment aligns with Starburst's recent business performance. On February 18, 2026, the company announced that its annual recurring revenue surpassed $100 million, with an AI annual run rate reaching $20 million, representing nearly 40% year-over-year growth. Financial services sector revenue grew approximately 85% year-over-year, with customers including four of the top five banks in the Americas and seven of the top ten banks in EMEA, and a net dollar retention rate of 130%. In a statement at the time, Borgman noted that over the past decade, the industry pursued a BI path of "centralize all data first, then analyze," but AI has changed the rules; enterprises now need a unified context layer that connects distributed data, governance, and business semantics.
The conference's three main themes correspond to different stages of AI implementation. The first theme focuses on the hidden costs of AI in production environments, where enterprises are no longer debating whether to adopt AI, but asking how to extract more value from data while keeping risks and costs under control, covering topics from the paradigm shift from static BI to conversational AI. The second theme revolves around governance and data access, focusing on secure query strategies across cloud platforms and on-premises systems, as well as balancing performance and cost. The third theme delves into the scaled deployment of agentic AI, exploring how to enable AI agents to securely execute tasks across multiple data sources, applications, and governance boundaries.
In terms of the technology ecosystem, Starburst completed a deep integration with Google Cloud Lakehouse in April 2026. This integration allows Starburst to share the same Lakehouse runtime catalog with engines like BigQuery and Spark, enabling real-time metadata change interoperability between different engines, with maintenance operations for Apache Iceberg tables automatically offloaded to Google Cloud's underlying infrastructure for execution. This integration solution, originating from the Google Cloud Next conference announcement, is regarded by the industry as a representative practice of shifting from single-engine dominance to multi-engine interoperability.
Founded in 2017 and headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, Starburst's core product is built on Trino, the open-source distributed SQL query engine, providing fast and secure data access across on-premises, multi-cloud, and hybrid environments. The platform enables unified management of distributed data without complex data migration. The company currently serves numerous industry clients across more than 60 countries and regions, with total cumulative funding exceeding $414 million.
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