Astronomer builds Astro, a unified DataOps platform centered on Apache Airflow that combines orchestration with observability, lineage, data quality, integrated dbt workflows and cost optimization. The company has recently expanded its product beyond orchestration to address data observability and governance needs for production AI and MLOps. Astronomer reports strong operating metrics: 150%+ YoY Astro ARR growth, 130% net revenue retention, 90%+ product utilization, and a two-year path to profitability. Astro is trusted by more than 700 enterprises and the underlying Airflow project is used by over 80K organizations and saw 324M+ downloads in 2024. Engineering contributions from Astronomer helped enable the general availability of Airflow 3.0, which the company says improves security, usability, and production AI support. Astronomer plans to use new capital to accelerate R&D and expand its international presence. Astronomer develops commercial data orchestration tools powered by Apache Airflow that enable teams to build, run, and observe pipelines-as-code. The company says Airflow is used across hundreds of thousands of data teams and records about 8 million monthly downloads, up from 180,000 in 2018, and Astronomer represents 16 of the top 25 all-time contributors to Airflow. Astronomer has grown its headcount roughly tenfold over two years to more than 250 employees and maintains hubs in Cincinnati, New York, San Francisco and San Jose. Management plans to launch a product and scale field teams, while using new capital to grow engineering and customer success, advance technology development, and scale go-to-market operations. The company recently acquired Datakin to add data lineage capabilities and to better connect lineage and orchestration end-to-end. The $213 million Series C closing provides what the CEO described as a cash cushion to advance these strategic plans. Founded in 2018 by Joe Otto and based in Cincinnati, Ohio, Astronomer develops data orchestration solutions built on Apache Airflow. The company offers a multi-tenant, multi-cloud Airflow-as-a-Service product alongside a Kubernetes-native platform to deploy, manage and scale distributed Airflow services. Astronomer targets organizations using Airflow — an open-source project originally developed at Airbnb and adopted by thousands of companies including Lyft, PayPal, Twitter and Apple. The company raised a $5.7M seed round and intends to use the proceeds to continue expanding operations. Leadership changes accompanying the round include Tim Guleri of Sierra Ventures joining the board. No operating metrics were disclosed in the article. Astronomer provides a solution that eases the pain around data analytics by assembling and organizing data after collection, freeing engineering resources to focus on analysis. The platform reduces the time data teams spend on data capture and management, allowing users to obtain needed data on demand with light configuration. According to the company, data scientists spend roughly 90% of their time capturing and managing data, a core problem Astronomer targets. The company was founded in 2015 and is based in Cincinnati. Astronomer recently raised $3.5M in new capital led by Wireframe Ventures and CincyTech, with debt financing participation from Silicon Valley Bank; other investors include Frontline Ventures (UK), Grand Ventures, Drummond Road, Core Network, and M25 Group. It previously raised $1.9M in seed funding from AngelPad, 500 Startups, Social Starts, First Ascent and several midwestern funds. The new capital will be used to expand the company’s sales and engineering operations. Astronomer builds a platform to connect disparate SaaS systems via their APIs and integrate their data into an actionable body of information. The stack is built on open-source technology and its components are designed to interoperate with other open-source tools; job code written to the Beam API can swap execution engines such as Spark or Flink. The product targets use cases including business intelligence and marketing, event-triggered automation, and optimization of large fleets of machinery. The company is working on tooling to help clients who aren’t sure where to start and is actively building out additional features. Astronomer began in 2014 as USERcycle and is based in Cincinnati. It reports $550,000 in annual recurring revenue and says it has processed billions of events.

Total raised

$317M

Funding rounds

6

Latest round

Series D

Latest activity

May 2025