Xiang Fu

Co-Founder StarTree

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Xiang Fu is a co-founder of StarTree and the founder of Apache Pinot, the open-source real-time distributed OLAP datastore that the company was created to commercialise. The two facts are inseparable: Pinot was built by Fu and Kishore Gopalakrishna as engineering leads at LinkedIn, to solve a problem that no available database solved. LinkedIn’s transactional stores were fast but could not answer complex analytical questions; its analytical stores could answer the questions but not at the concurrency and latency a feature shown to every member requires. The answer was a new distributed OLAP system built for user-facing analytics — queries triggered by end users rather than by analysts — and once open-sourced it was adopted in production by more than thirty-five companies including Stripe, Uber, Target, Walmart and WePay. Between LinkedIn and StarTree, Fu was a founding engineer and architect of Uber’s streaming data platform, running real-time data for Uber Rides, Uber Eats and Uber Freight. StarTree, which he co-founded with Gopalakrishna as chief executive, had raised 75 million dollars as of its August 2022 Series B.

Career Highlights

• Founder and project management committee member of Apache Pinot, the open-source real-time distributed OLAP datastore.
• Co-founder of StarTree, the company commercialising Pinot, alongside chief executive Kishore Gopalakrishna.
• Built the original Pinot system as an engineering lead at LinkedIn, then helped open-source it through the Apache Software Foundation.
• Founding engineer and architect of Uber’s Streaming Data Platform team, supporting Uber Rides, Uber Eats and Uber Freight at very large scale.
• Senior Software Engineer at LinkedIn from 2013 to 2015, and Senior Staff Software Engineer at Uber from 2015.
• StarTree raised a 47 million dollar Series B in August 2022 led by GGV Capital with Sapphire Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures and CRV, taking total funding to 75 million dollars.

Professional Journey

Fu joined LinkedIn as a senior software engineer in 2013, and it was there, working alongside Kishore Gopalakrishna, that the work he is known for began. LinkedIn had a problem that at the time had no off-the-shelf answer. Features like “who viewed your profile” are analytical queries — aggregations over large volumes of event data — but they are triggered by end users, at end-user concurrency, and they have to return in milliseconds. Transactional databases were fast but structurally wrong for the query shape. Analytical databases had the right query model but were built for a handful of analysts, not for millions of members hitting them simultaneously. Pinot was the system built to occupy that gap, and the category it defined — user-facing analytics — is now a recognised one largely because of it.

In 2015 Fu moved to Uber as a senior staff software engineer and became a founding engineer of the Streaming Data Platform team. The problem space was adjacent but harder in a different direction: Uber’s real-time data served operational systems across Rides, Eats and Freight, which meant ingestion, processing, serving and analysis all had to work at a scale and a freshness that few companies then required. He held a graduate research assistantship at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the same period.

Pinot meanwhile was open-sourced and became an Apache project, with Fu as its founder and a member of its project management committee. Adoption spread well beyond LinkedIn — more than thirty-five companies ran it in production, among them Stripe, Uber, Target, Walmart and WePay, with Microsoft and Factual also named as production users. That adoption curve is what made a company viable: an open-source system with genuine production users and no commercial vendor behind it is an obvious opening.

Fu and Gopalakrishna founded StarTree to be that vendor, building a managed, cloud-native commercial platform on Pinot with Gopalakrishna as chief executive. Sources differ on whether the company dates from 2019 or January 2020. It raised a 24 million dollar Series A co-led by GGV Capital, and in August 2022 a 47 million dollar Series B, again led by GGV with Sapphire Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures and CRV participating — 75 million dollars in total at that point. The company had around seventy employees at the time of the Series B with plans to reach 150, and named customers including Guitar Center, Pluto TV, Stripe and JustEatTakeaway.com. Fu continues as a co-founder of the company and an active figure in the Pinot community, speaking regularly at data engineering conferences.

Education

Tsinghua University

B.Eng., Electronic Engineering

Georgia Institute of Technology

M.S., Computational Science and Engineering

The Tsinghua degree is confirmed independently. The Georgia Tech master’s is carried forward from an earlier record and was not directly confirmed during this review, though his 2015 graduate research assistantship at Georgia Tech is consistent with it. No graduation years are published.