Plan your Starburst NSO exercise
Calculator · free · no signup · pre-IPOStarburst is pre-IPO. Plan your NSO exercise tax (federal, state, FICA) at any expected valuation.
Beta · invite-only · AlphaLatitude Inc. · Free Tools
Your grant
Seeded from secondary-market data, as of Jun 16, 2026
Tax inputs
Hold strategy
No bargain element. Current price is at or below the strike — no tax owed at exercise. Wait for the stock to appreciate past the strike before exercising.
Estimates only. Excludes AMT (NSOs do not trigger AMT), state-AMT, multi-state moves, and disqualifying-disposition edge cases. Not financial advice.
You calculated one NSO decision. The beta plans NSOs alongside RSUs and ISOs in a single multi-year tax plan.
Request beta access →About Starburst
Starburst is a privately held Data company, incorporated in Delaware and headquartered in Boston, MA.
Last reported secondary-market price: $0.59 per share (as of 2026-06-16). Your own 409A may differ.
Trino-based analytics.
Equity grants at Starburst typically include incentive stock options (ISOs) and non-qualified stock options (NSOs).
Justin Borgman and engineers including Kamil Bajda-Pawlikowski, Dain Sundstrom, and Martin Traverso, core contributors to Facebook's Presto distributed SQL engine, founded Starburst in 2017 to commercialize that technology. The platform, built on the open-source Trino query engine (formerly PrestoSQL), lets analysts run federated SQL queries across data lakes, warehouses, and operational databases without moving data. Starburst raised a $250 million Series D in February 2022 at a $3.35 billion valuation, bringing total funding to $414 million.
Sources: starburst.io · techtarget.com
OptionsAhoy is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Starburst.
Starburst NSO exercise creates ordinary income on the bargain element (federal, state, and FICA) at the price on the day you exercise. The calculator works at any valuation, so you can model your exercise cost at the current 409A FMV, an expected IPO price, or post-IPO scenarios.
All Starburst tools → · Use the generic NSO Exercise Calculator for any company.
Starburst equity questions
- How is a Starburst NSO exercise taxed?
- Exercising a non-qualified stock option (NSO) creates ordinary income on the bargain element (the price on the day you exercise minus your strike), subject to federal income tax, state income tax, and FICA. The calculator above computes that tax for your Starburst grant and compares selling the shares now against holding past the one-year mark for long-term capital-gains treatment.
- Does Starburst grant ISOs, NSOs, or RSUs?
- Equity compensation at Starburst typically takes the form of incentive stock options (ISOs) and non-qualified stock options (NSOs). Incentive stock options can trigger the alternative minimum tax (AMT) when you exercise.
- Are Starburst shares eligible for QSBS?
- They might be. Qualified small business stock (QSBS) under Internal Revenue Code Section 1202 can exclude federal tax on much of the gain when shares were acquired at original issuance from a C-corporation while its gross assets were under $50 million, and held at least five years. Whether your Starburst shares qualify turns on when you acquired them and the company's asset size at that time.
One piece of the puzzle.
OptionsAhoy plans your Starburst equity alongside hedging, vesting, and de-concentration, across bullish, neutral, and bearish market scenarios. Free during beta.