Astronomer Rockets to a $93 Million Series D 🚀
How Grand Ventures’ First Investment Became a Category King—and What Comes Next
Last week Astronomer announced its $93 million Series D funding round led by Bain Capital Ventures, with Salesforce Ventures, Insight, Meritech, Venrock and Bosch Ventures.
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 Astronomer’s 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 Astronomer’s momentum and why Grand believed their Apache Airflow‑powered vision could redefine DataOps. Three years later, the thesis is paying off in a big way.
Why This Round Matters
- Positions Astronomer as the ‘Control Plane’ for the modern data stack. 700+ enterprises now build, run, and operate their mission‑critical pipelines on Astronomer’s Astro platform, relying on its native observability and cost‑optimization layers for enterprise-grade DataOps.
- Execution on Astronomer’s product roadmap which leans heavily into AI’s data‑dependency tailwind. As every Fortune 2000 company scrambles to productionize generative‑AI, orchestrating multi‑modal 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 Astronomer’s recent growth is customers leaning heavily into MLOp and GenAI use cases.
- Continues fueling Astronomer’s open‑source flywheel. With Airflow downloads still compounding and more than 45,000 GitHub Stars. Airflow popularity keeps compounding—31 million monthly downloads, 3 k+ contributors, and 77 k organizations as of Nov 2024 (up ~85×, ~2.3×, ~3× vs. 2020). That momentum cements Astronomer as Airflow’s commercial steward. The April launch of Apache AirFlow 3.0 is the latest proof of Astronomer’s 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 Astronomer’s global expansion, fueling new enterprise go‑to‑market teams in EMEA and APAC.
- Enables Astronomer to double down on their open‑source stewardship of the Apache Airflow project via continued investment in Airflow core.
Grand’s Call to Open‑Source Founders
Grand Ventures has invested across a wide range of open‑source startups—from observability to data infrastructure—and we’re actively hunting for the next great early stage #OSS company. If you’re building in DevOps, Developer Tools, or adjacent corners of the stack, let’s talk. You can learn more about how Grand evaluates open-source based/centric startups here.
You can reach me at [email protected].
