- Astronomer, a leading provider of managed Apache Airflow as a Service, announced recently that it raised $5.7 million in seed funding led by Sierra Ventures
Astronomer — a leading provider of managed Apache Airflow as a Service — recently announced that it raised $5.7 million in seed funding led by Sierra Ventures. Bain Capital Ventures, Refinery Ventures, Frontline Capital Ventures, CincyTech, Wireframe Ventures, and Grand Ventures also joined the round.
This round of funding further validates Airflow’s momentum and Astronomer’s success in designing and operating Astronomer Cloud, which is the fastest-growing multi-tenant Airflow as a Service platform.
Apache Airflow was developed at Airbnb and it has become the de facto standard for workflow orchestration for the modern data stack. Ever since it started as an open-source project in 2016, thousands of companies including Uber, Lyft, Twitter, PayPal, and Apple have adopted Airflow.
“It’s easy to see why Airflow has reached such unprecedented levels of adoption by data engineering teams across the globe,” said Astronomer CEO Joe Otto. “With this financing, we are directing more investment toward the Apache Airflow project to bolster the already impressive capabilities of Airflow, and are partnering with leading worldwide organizations to improve the efficiency of their complex data flows and create a new standard for data orchestration in the modern enterprise.”
Airflow enjoyed strong growth with over 2 million downloads to date and surged to more than 250,000 per month since becoming a top-level Apache project earlier this year.
“I created Airflow to help data engineers solve complex data orchestration problems. It’s very exciting and rewarding to see adoption accelerate to so many data teams around the world,” explained Maxime Beauchemin, the creator of Apache Airflow and Strategic Advisor to Astronomer. “I’m honored to continue partnering with Astronomer and the vibrant Airflow Community to fulfill the vision and potential of Airflow.”
In conjunction with this funding round, Sierra Ventures managing director Tim Guleri is joining Astronomer’s Board of Directors.
“Astronomer is creating a new multi-billion dollar developer-led category: Programmatic Data Integration Platform,” added Guleri. “I love big macro trends and innovative teams, and I found that in Astronomer. We look forward to working with their talented leadership team in its next phase of growth.”
Astronomer’s seamless integration with Kubernetes native services is the foundation of Astronomer Cloud, which is the market-leading Airflow as a Service offering and also provides the blueprint for Astronomer Enterprise. And Astronomer Enterprise is similar to Astronomer Cloud as it supports hundreds of independent Airflow deployments for enterprises across the globe as it provides a secure service console and policy engine to dynamically provision and manages any number of Airflow deployments within a single enterprise.
