Astronomer nabs $93M for its data pipeline platform

Astronomer Inc., a startup that helps organizations move data between their applications, has secured a $93 million funding round.

The company announced the Series D investment today. Bain Capital Ventures led the round with participation from Salesforce Ventures, Insight and other institutional backers.

Astronomer offers a paid cloud version of Apache Airflow, a popular open-source platform for creating data pipelines. A data pipeline is a software workflow that moves information between applications. Such workflows can, for example, combine ad campaign performance metrics from two marketing tools and load them into an analytics application. They’re also capable of modifying information along the way.

One of Airflow’s main selling points is that it allows developers to write data pipelines in Python. The programming language includes prepackaged code modules for tasks such as running mathematical calculations. Those modules remove the need to write data processing pipelines from scratch, which speeds up development.

Airflow started out as an internal project at Airbnb Inc. more than a decade ago. It has since been adopted by more than 80,000 organizations.

Astronomer’s commercial version of Airflow, Astro, enables companies to run the data pipeline platform in the cloud. It provides high-availability features designed to reduce the risk of outages. Built-in development tools automate some of the manual work involved in writing data pipelines.

When a program isn’t actively used, its infrastructure consumption must be reduced to zero to avoid unnecessary hardware costs. In practice, however, shutting down a program completely and reactivating it the next time it’s needed can be technically challenging. As a result, companies often leave applications running even when they’re not actively used.

Astro provides a so-called scale to zero feature that addresses the challenge. According to Astronomer, it allows developers to hibernate an Airflow environment while it’s not actively used to avoid unnecessary infrastructure usage.

Astro is based on Airflow 3.0, a new version of the data pipeline platform that rolled out earlier this year. The release makes it easier to troubleshoot directed acyclic graphs, or DAGs, code structures that developers use to specify how a data pipeline should work. A DAG describes what tasks the pipeline will perform and the order in which those tasks should be carried out.

Astronomer says that its latest funding round follows a year in which annual recurring revenue from Astro grew 140%, off an undisclosed base. Additionally, the company took steps to boost operational efficiency that it says put it on track to become profitable within two years. Astronomer will use the new funding to enhance Astro and grow its international presence. 

Image: Astronomer