Astronomer Rockets to a $93 Million Series D š
How Grand Venturesā First Investment Became a Category Kingāand What Comes Next
Last week Astronomer announced its $93āÆmillion Series D funding round led by Bain Capital Ventures, with Salesforce Ventures, Insight, Meritech, Venrock and BoschāÆVentures.
Astronomer was our first investment out of Grand Ventures Fund I back in 2017. We partnered with Astronomer before a line of Airflow-related commercial code shipped, convinced by a founding team who believed Apache Airflow could become for data what Kubernetes is for containers. In 2023, Andy Byron stepped into the CEO role, leading Astronomerās transition from scrappy startup to a category leader. Since his arrival, Andy and his leadership team have been putting on a master class in execution.
Back in early 2022, I wrote about Astronomerās momentum and why Grand believed their Apache Airflowāpowered vision could redefine DataOps. Three years later, the thesis is paying off in a big way.

Why This Round Matters
- Positions Astronomer as the āControl Planeā for the modern data stack. 700+ enterprises now build, run, and operate their missionācritical pipelines on AstronomerāsĀ Astro platform, relying on its native observability and costāoptimization layers for enterprise-grade DataOps.
- Execution on Astronomerās product roadmap which leans heavily into AIās dataādependency tailwind. As every FortuneāÆ2000 company scrambles to productionize generativeāAI, orchestrating multiāmodal data workflows has become the gating factor. While traditional use cases like data ingestion, and ETL/ELT for analytics and business operations are still very popular with Airflow, much of Astronomerās recent growth is customers leaning heavily into MLOp and GenAI use cases.
- Continues fueling Astronomerās openāsource flywheel. With Airflow downloads still compounding and more thanĀ 45,000 GitHub Stars. Airflow popularity keeps compoundingā31āÆmillion monthly downloads, 3āÆk+ contributors, and 77āÆk organizationsĀ as of NovāÆ2024 (upāÆ~85Ć,āÆ~2.3Ć,āÆ~3Ć vs.āÆ2020). That momentum cements Astronomer as Airflowās commercial steward. The April launch ofĀ Apache AirFlow 3.0Ā is the latest proof of Astronomerās instrumental role in driving the project forward.
Grand Ventures Vantage Point
Astronomer will leverage this most recent Series D funding round to:
- Continued layering additional capabilities around the core data orchestration including observability/lineage, data quality, integrated dbt workflows, cost optimization and other capabilities.
- Driving Astronomerās global expansion, fueling new enterprise goātoāmarket teams in EMEA and APAC.
- Enables Astronomer to double down on their openāsource stewardship of the Apache Airflow project via continued investment in Airflow core.

Grandās Call to OpenāSource Founders
GrandāÆVentures has invested across a wide range of openāsource startupsāfrom observability to data infrastructureāand weāre actively hunting for the next great early stage #OSS company. If youāre building in DevOps, Developer Tools, or adjacent corners of the stack, letās talk. You can learn more about how Grand evaluates open-source based/centric startups here.
You can reach me at [email protected].