Astronomer Raises $213M Series C and Acquires Datakin

SAN FRANCISCO and CINCINNATI, March 23, 2022 — Astronomer, developer of a modern data orchestration platform powered by Apache Airflow, today announced that it has raised $213 million in a Series C round, led by global growth equity and venture capital firm Insight Partners, with participation by Meritech Capital, Salesforce Ventures, J.P. Morgan, K5 Global, Sutter Hill Ventures, Venrock and Sierra Ventures.

The funding primed Astronomer to acquire Datakin, the data operations tool from the founders of the OpenLineage and Marquez open-source projects. Astronomer will also use the capital to grow its world-class Engineering and Customer Success teams, accelerate the growth of its Apache Airflow-powered data orchestration platform and scale its go-to-market operations.

“As companies of all sizes struggle to make sense of their data, data orchestration has become a competitive necessity,” said Joe Otto, CEO of Astronomer. “At the same time, data teams must be able to trust their data to effectively extract its value. By integrating Datakin’s intuitive data lineage features with Astronomer, our customers are able to build faster, run with confidence and reduce their operational risks. We are excited to soon unveil what’s next from our team, fueled by our Series C and the incredible support of our investors.”

“As the modern data stack has arrived at scale, we now need an orchestration experience to support today’s sophisticated, high-velocity data pipelines. Apache Airflow, driven by the Astronomer team, has become the generational platform for modern orchestration,” said George Mathew, Managing Director at Insight Partners. “We are looking forward to partnering with the Astronomer team as they scale up this profound journey.”

Astronomer helps teams unlock the full benefits of data orchestration through Airflow, an open-source platform for data engineering pipelines that has emerged as the de facto standard to express data flows as code. Hundreds of thousands of data teams use Airflow with 8 million monthly downloads, up from 180,000 in 2018. Astronomer engineers represent 16 of the top 25 all-time contributors to Airflow and have been pivotal in driving the direction of Airflow since 2018. Through its acquisition of Datakin, Astronomer will enable data teams to unlock operational lineage as a native component of their orchestration platform.

“Our mission at Datakin is to help organizations build and manage amazing data ecosystems,” said Laurent Paris, CEO of Datakin and SVP of Research & Development at Astronomer. “We share this mission with Astronomer, and joining forces will accelerate us both and provide an unparalleled experience for Airflow users. Combining the orchestration capabilities of Airflow with the observability offered by OpenLineage will allow Astronomer to provide value across the modern data stack, transforming the way organizations work with data.”

Demand for Astronomer is skyrocketing as more teams look to make sense of their data universe and unlock the value of data orchestration. Astronomer’s global customers range from innovative startups to the world’s largest big-box retailers. One Fortune 10 customer leveraged Astronomer to increase its sales by $300 million, and Astronomer is used by nine of the world’s top 12 gaming companies and three of the top 10 Wall Street banks. As validation of Astronomer’s power, Gartner recognized Astronomer as a Cool Vendor in Data for Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in 2021.

Astronomer’s data orchestration platform enables entire data teams to build faster together by accelerating the development of data pipelines with tools that allow them to focus on code that impacts the business. Astronomer offers unmatched scalability and multi-cloud deployments.

To meet its growing customer needs, Astronomer has increased its headcount 10x since 2020, now exceeding 250 global employees, with hubs in Cincinnati, New York, San Francisco and San Jose, Calif.

Learn more about Astronomer’s data orchestration platform here.

About Astronomer

Astronomer is the developer of a modern data orchestration platform, powered by Apache Airflow, that enables data teams to increase the availability of trusted data. As the commercial developer of Airflow, Astronomer enables data engineers, data scientists and data analysts to build, run and observe pipelines-as-code, which improves productivity and data availability, reduces costs and results in a better understanding of complex dependencies across the entire data ecosystem. Founded in 2018, Astronomer is a global remote-first company with hubs in Cincinnati, Ohio; New York; San Francisco and San Jose, Calif. Customers, including Condé Nast, Sonos, Rappi, StockX and Electronic Arts, in more than 35 countries trust Astronomer as their partner for data orchestration. The company’s investors include Bain Capital Ventures, Insight Partners, J.P. Morgan, K5 Global, Meritech Capital, Salesforce Ventures, Sierra Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures and Venrock. For more information, visit www.astronomer.io.

Source: Astronomer