This page has been split into two pages, because Starburst the company and Trino the open-source project are two different things and were getting tangled up here.

• Trino — the open-source distributed SQL query engine. The 2018 fork from Presto, the architecture, the connector ecosystem, who runs it in production. This is the right page if you want to understand the project itself.
• Starburst — the commercial company founded in 2017 that employs most of the Trino maintainers, and sells Starburst Enterprise (self-managed) and Starburst Galaxy (managed cloud SaaS). This is the right page if you want to understand the company, its products, its funding, and its strategy.

The short version of the relationship: Starburst is to Trino what Confluent is to Kafka, or Databricks is to Spark. Starburst is the commercial sponsor of the open-source project, employs most of the lead committers, and sells a managed and enhanced commercial distribution. Trino is genuinely open (Apache 2.0), and you can run it without any commercial relationship with Starburst — many large tech companies (Netflix, LinkedIn, Goldman Sachs) do exactly that.