About Astronomer
Astronomer was founded in 2018 to commercialize and support Apache Airflow, an open-source workflow orchestration tool originally created at Airbnb that has become one of the most widely used systems for scheduling, monitoring, and managing complex data pipelines, the automated sequences of steps that move and transform data between the many different systems modern companies rely on for analytics, reporting, and increasingly AI applications. Astronomer's flagship commercial product, Astro, provides a fully managed version of Airflow, handling infrastructure operations such as scaling, security, monitoring, and upgrades so that data engineering teams can focus on building and maintaining their actual data pipelines rather than operating the underlying orchestration infrastructure themselves.
As Airflow adoption grew dramatically, reaching tens of thousands of organizations and hundreds of millions of downloads annually, Astronomer positioned itself as the primary commercial steward of the project and the natural choice for companies wanting enterprise-grade support, security compliance, and managed hosting rather than running open-source Airflow entirely on their own. The company has expanded its platform to address the growing role of orchestration in powering not just traditional business intelligence and reporting pipelines but also machine learning and generative AI workflows, including launching an AI-powered data engineering agent called Otto to help automate pipeline building and maintenance tasks. Astronomer received significant public attention in July 2025 when its then-CEO and chief people officer were caught on a stadium jumbotron at a Coldplay concert in a viral moment that drew widespread media coverage; Pete DeJoy, one of the company's co-founders, subsequently became CEO. Astronomer has raised substantial venture funding, including a $93 million Series D round in 2025 led by Bain Capital Ventures with participation from Salesforce Ventures, and competes with cloud providers' native orchestration services as well as other workflow orchestration tools such as Dagster and Prefect.
