Data sprawl is real. Today’s enterprises are struggling to keep up with the growing complexity of their data infrastructure. Data pipelines often involve moving data between numerous legacy systems, cloud warehouses, processing engines, and BI tools and applications. Managing these intricate workflows efficiently and reliably at scale is a major challenge, and manually scheduling and monitoring these data flows is inefficient and often results in errors.
Apache Airflow has emerged as the open-source standard for data orchestration, adopted by more than 80K organizations worldwide to manage large-scale data operations. With over 31 million monthly downloads, Airflow is the preferred technology for orchestrating complex data pipelines within large enterprises. However, deploying, managing, and scaling Airflow effectively requires significant expertise and resources. This creates a market opportunity for a platform that simplifies and enhances the Airflow experience for enterprise data teams.
The Solution
Astronomer provides a comprehensive platform designed for data teams to centrally build, run, and observe their workflows using Apache Airflow. As the primary commercial entity behind Airflow and its main contributor, Astronomer is uniquely positioned to deliver enterprise-grade Airflow solutions.
The Astronomer platform addresses key challenges faced by organizations using Airflow:
Deployment: Simplifies deployment pipelines, eliminating the need to manually manage infrastructure.
Scalability: Allows teams to easily set up, maintain, and collaborate across multiple Airflow instances with enterprise features like RBAC and SSO.
Visibility: Offers built-in monitoring and integrations for Airflow health, providing crucial operational insights.
Support: Provides expert enterprise support, crucial for businesses relying on Airflow for mission-critical data operations.
Astronomer’s flagship product, Astro, is a fully managed cloud service for Airflow, available on AWS, GCP, and Azure. It is making Airflow more accessible to enterprises of all sizes and has consequently seen phenomenal growth exceeding 300% YoY. Due to this success, Astronomer is expanding its offering with Astro Observe, a new platform add-on focusing on data observability, lineage, data quality, and cost management.
Why We’re Doubling Down On Astronomer
We started our relationship with Astronomer as part of their Series C in 2021, when Airflow usage was an order of magnitude smaller. Our investment thesis from that time remains relevant today, and is attributable to several key factors:
Market Leadership & Open Source Dominance: Astronomer is the definitive commercial leader built around Airflow, the undisputed open-source standard for data orchestration. Their deep involvement and contribution to the Airflow project provide unparalleled expertise.
Proven Enterprise Traction: Astronomer has successfully demonstrated its ability to service the strategic enterprise with 700+ enterprise customers, including brands like Ford, Marriott, Wynn, Booking.com, Northern Trust, and Autodesk. They consistently win against competitive offerings with their richer platform capabilities and deeper expertise, and are increasingly replacing legacy ETL systems. Case studies from Fortune 500 customers highlight significant expansion and ROI.
Rapid Product Growth: Astronomer has expanded beyond Airflow orchestration with Astro, its unified DataOps platform. In the past year Astro has expanded capabilities to data observability, integrated dbt workflows, data platform cost optimization, and more. With Airflow orchestration as the foundation, Astronomer will continue to consolidate more features onto Astro.
Strengthened Leadership & Improved Fundamentals: Since CEO Andy Byron joined in July 2023, Astronomer has demonstrated impressive acceleration in growth while dramatically improving GTM and capital efficiency.
What’s Ahead?
Astronomer is strategically positioned to leverage data orchestration as a wedge into the broader DataOps market. The team’s vision extends beyond scheduling pipelines to encompass critical areas like data observability, cost management, data quality, cataloging, and governance. The launch of Astro Observe is a key step in this direction.
We believe Astronomer has the potential to become the central control plane for the modern data stack, displacing legacy tools and consolidating key DataOps functions. With a clear path to massive scale, Astronomer is well on its way to becoming a category-defining company in the data infrastructure landscape.
We’re excited to double-down on our initial investment and back Astronomer’s $93M Series D round to continue supporting Andy and the entire Astronomer team alongside our friends at Bain Capital Ventures, Bosch Ventures, Venrock, Insight, and Meritech Capital.
Thank you for being apart of the Salesforce Ventures family, Astronomer! We’re thrilled to continue this partnership.
