Kishore Gopalakrishna

Co-Founder & CEO StarTree

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Kishore Gopalakrishna is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of StarTree, the company commercialising Apache Pinot — a distributed real-time OLAP datastore he created at LinkedIn. His career is an unusually pure example of the open-source-to-company path, and the technical work behind it is substantial in its own right: alongside Pinot he authored Apache Helix, a cluster management framework that is a top-level Apache project, and built Espresso, LinkedIn’s distributed document store, and ThirdEye, its anomaly detection platform. Pinot itself began as an answer to a specific product problem. LinkedIn wanted to show members who had viewed their profile, updated in real time and queried by millions of people, and no system then available could serve that workload at the required scale and latency. The datastore built for it has since become production infrastructure at Uber, Walmart, Target, Cisco Webex, DoorDash, Stripe and Etsy. StarTree packages it as a managed cloud service with enterprise features, has grown past a hundred employees, and raised a $47 million Series B in 2022 followed by a strategic investment from Citi in 2024.

Career Highlights

• Created Apache Pinot at LinkedIn, built originally to power the “Who viewed my profile?” feature at a scale existing systems could not serve.
• Authored Apache Helix, a cluster management framework for distributed systems and a top-level Apache project.
• Built Espresso, LinkedIn’s distributed document store, and ThirdEye, its anomaly detection platform.
• Co-founded StarTree with Xiang Fu, a fellow Pinot creator from LinkedIn, and leads it as Chief Executive Officer.
• Grew the company from 18 people at its Series A to more than 100 globally.
• Raised a $47 million Series B in 2022 with Bain Capital and Sapphire Ventures among the investors, and secured a strategic investment from Citi in 2024.
• Doubled customers and revenue across 2023, with the platform reported to serve around a billion queries a week at petabyte scale.
• Apache Pinot and StarTree Cloud run in production at LinkedIn, Uber, Walmart, Target, Cisco Webex, DoorDash, 7-Eleven, Etsy, Razorpay and Blinkit.

Professional Journey

Gopalakrishna’s career at LinkedIn was spent on the hardest class of infrastructure problem — distributed systems that have to stay correct and fast while the data and the traffic grow by orders of magnitude. He produced an unusual quantity of durable work there. Apache Helix, a framework for managing partitioned, replicated and distributed resources across a cluster, became a top-level Apache project and is used well beyond LinkedIn. Espresso was LinkedIn’s distributed document store. ThirdEye handled anomaly detection across the company’s metrics.

Apache Pinot came out of a concrete product requirement rather than an architectural ambition. LinkedIn wanted to surface, to every member, who had recently looked at their profile — a query that is trivial in isolation and brutal at LinkedIn’s scale, because it must be answered in milliseconds, for hundreds of millions of users, over data that is changing continuously. Batch analytics systems were too slow and transactional stores could not aggregate. Pinot was built to occupy that gap: a columnar, distributed OLAP datastore designed for high-throughput, low-latency queries on freshly ingested data. It became foundational at LinkedIn and was donated to the Apache Software Foundation, where it was adopted by companies facing the same shape of problem — Uber for its marketplace operations, Walmart and Target in retail, Cisco within Webex, DoorDash, Stripe and Etsy.

The route to a company was indirect. Gopalakrishna left LinkedIn and joined a startup then in stealth, where he ran into the real-time analytics problem again from the other side — as a customer rather than an author — and concluded that Pinot was the only system that met the need. That recognition, he has said with family encouragement behind it, was the trigger for founding StarTree with Xiang Fu, who had also worked on Pinot at LinkedIn.

StarTree’s product is StarTree Cloud, a fully managed Pinot service with enterprise features and performance work layered on top — the standard shape of an open-source company, where the differentiation is operational rather than functional, and the commercial question is whether running a demanding distributed system yourself is worth the saving. The company started at 18 employees around its Series A and passed a hundred globally by 2024. A $47 million Series B closed in 2022 with Bain Capital and Sapphire Ventures among the backers. 2023 saw customers and revenue double, with the platform reported to be handling roughly a billion queries a week at petabyte scale, and in 2024 Citi made a strategic investment — a notable signal, since financial services real-time analytics is both a demanding workload and a conservative buyer.

Education

No education was found in any public source for Kishore Gopalakrishna. StarTree’s own site and the third-party profiles of him are silent on his academic background, and one long-form interview that might have covered it could not be retrieved. None is asserted here.