Company Profile • Data Infrastructure • New York
Astronomer
The company running the world's data pipelines - and the commercial home of Apache Airflow.
The company running the world's data pipelines - and the commercial home of Apache Airflow.
Every dashboard, machine-learning model, and AI feature depends on data arriving in the right place, in the right shape, at the right time. The unglamorous machinery that makes that happen is called data orchestration, and Astronomer has built a business on doing it well. The New York company is the commercial steward of Apache Airflow, the open-source project that became the de facto standard for scheduling and managing data pipelines, and its flagship product, Astro, packages that engine into a fully managed, cloud-native platform.
Astronomer was founded in 2015 by Ry Walker, Greg Neiheisel, and Tim Brunk. It started in Cincinnati, Ohio before basing itself in New York City, and over the following decade it made a deliberate bet: rather than compete with Apache Airflow, it would become the place enterprises go to run it. That bet turned into deep involvement in the open-source project itself. Since 2018, Astronomer employees have helped steer every Airflow release, and the company employs a large share of the project's core committers.
The result is a company that sits at an unusual intersection - part open-source steward, part enterprise software vendor. Airflow is free to download and run. Astronomer's proposition is that running it reliably at scale, across clouds, with observability and support, is a job worth paying for.
“Astronomer is the best place to run Apache Airflow.”
Astronomer's platform spans the full lifecycle of a data pipeline - from writing it as code, to running it across clouds, to watching it in production.
The fully managed, cloud-native orchestration platform powered by Apache Airflow. Teams build, run, scale, and observe pipelines across AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure with autoscaling, CI/CD, role-based access, and deployment rollbacks.
A unified observability layer that gives a single pane of glass over pipeline health and the wider data supply chain - with AI log summaries, an Insights Engine, data lineage, and Snowflake cost management.
A self-managed deployment for enterprises that need to run Airflow inside their own infrastructure, with the same tooling and support.
An open-source package that simplifies orchestrating dbt (data build tool) transformations directly inside Airflow.
A registry of Airflow providers, modules, and DAGs, plus a command-line tool for local development and one-command deploys.
Training and certification programs for Apache Airflow and the Astro platform, feeding the open-source community and enterprise teams alike.
Data pipelines fail quietly and expensively. A broken job overnight can mean stale dashboards, a mispriced product, or a machine-learning model trained on missing data. Traditionally, keeping pipelines healthy meant a patchwork of cron jobs, custom scripts, and on-call engineers piecing together what went wrong from scattered logs.
Astronomer's pitch is to collapse that complexity. Orchestration decides when and how data moves; observability tells you the moment something breaks and why. Astro Observe merges both into one platform, because in production they were never really separate concerns. AI log summaries pinpoint the failing task and suggest next steps, and the Insights Engine flags risks before they become outages.
What sets Astronomer apart from managed rivals like Amazon MWAA and Google Cloud Composer, or alternative frameworks like Dagster and Prefect, is its position inside Airflow itself. Because it employs so many of the project's committers, the company can shape the roadmap of the very engine everyone else is repackaging. For enterprises already standardized on Airflow, that closeness is a practical advantage - migrations are faster and support runs deeper.
“Astro Observe provides all teams using Apache Airflow with an actionable view of their entire data supply chain.”
Astronomer serves more than 700 enterprises across finance, healthcare, retail, manufacturing, and technology. Publicly referenced customers include Adobe, Marriott, Ford, Autodesk, Sweetgreen, and Foot Locker.
Astro is sold on usage-based pricing that scales with deployment size, number of active deployments, and compute. Standard deployments range from hundreds to a few thousand dollars a month.
Large customers sign custom annual agreements, with self-managed software licensing plus professional services, training, and support layered on top.
The free Apache Airflow project is the top of the funnel - millions of engineers adopt it, and a share graduate to Astronomer's managed platform.
Autodesk migrated 536 Oozie pipelines across 25 data-engineering teams onto Astro in roughly 12 weeks - a case study in how migration speed becomes a competitive moat for a managed orchestration vendor.
Ry Walker, Greg Neiheisel, and Tim Brunk found the company, pivoting toward data engineering built on Apache Airflow.
Astronomer employees start steering every Apache Airflow release, cementing the company's role in the open-source project.
A Series B round lands as demand for managed Airflow accelerates.
Astronomer releases Astro on AWS and Google Cloud, raises a $213M Series C, and crosses the $1B valuation mark.
General availability of Astro Observe unifies orchestration and observability; the company raises a $93M Series D for enterprise AI.
Co-founder Pete DeJoy steps into the CEO role following the resignation of Andy Byron.
Astronomer crossed the unicorn threshold in 2022 and returned to market in May 2025 with a round aimed squarely at enterprise AI workloads.
Astronomer is the best place to run Apache Airflow.
Astro Observe extends Astronomer beyond data orchestration into a platform for data operations.
Astro Observe provides all teams using Apache Airflow with an actionable view of their entire data supply chain.
Search links to Astronomer's own channel for platform walkthroughs, Airflow talks, and leadership interviews.
Astronomer builds Astro, a fully managed data orchestration and observability platform powered by Apache Airflow, that helps organizations build, run, and monitor the data pipelines behind analytics, applications, and AI.
Astronomer is the leading commercial steward of Apache Airflow. It employs a large share of the project's core committers, helps drive its releases, and sells a managed platform built on top of the open-source engine.
Managed rivals include Amazon MWAA, Google Cloud Composer, and Azure Data Factory, while alternative frameworks include Dagster, Prefect, Kestra, and Temporal. Open-source Apache Airflow itself is the free alternative.
Astronomer has raised roughly $378M in total, including a $93M Series D in May 2025 led by Bain Capital Ventures, and crossed the $1B valuation threshold in 2022.
Co-founder Pete DeJoy became CEO in 2025, stepping up from Chief Product Officer following the resignation of former CEO Andy Byron.