Astronomer rockets into 2022
When I joined Grand Ventures last year, a significant part of my decision-making criteria is that I wanted to work for a Venture firm that had real DNA investing into the DevOps space, a space I’ve spent a good portion of the last decade in various operator roles. When we launched Grand Ventures Fund II earlier this year, DevOps once again is a pillar focus area for investments.
At Grand Ventures we’ve been lucky enough to be part of the journey of one of the most exciting companies in the DevOps space over the past half decade, Astronomer. It’s been an exciting ride for Astronomer, particularly so far in 2022. In March, Astronomer, was named as one of of A16z’s inaugural Data50 class as a leader in the ETL / Orchestration category. Astronomer also announced they had closed a $213M Series C led by Insight Partners with participation by Sutter Hill Ventures, Meritech, Salesforce Ventures, Venrock, and Sierra Ventures.
Astronomer’s recent round of funding is yet another proof-point of the massive shift that has been occurring from legacy data orchestration tools to modern SaaS-based, open-source based data cloud orchestration solutions. Astronomer has become a driving force within that shift. Gartner estimates ~$850B in cloud infrastructure spend in 2025, and cloud/data orchestration is a foundational component of enabling cloud infrastructure.
Grand Ventures’ First Investment
In 2017, Astronomer became the very first company Grand Ventures invested into out of our very first fund. At that time, we saw a young, scrappy startup in Cincinnati that was just starting to address the need for a modernized approach to data orchestration via their focus on rapidly emerging open-source technology called Apache Airflow. Their thesis was that data pipelines were going to be at the center of the entire enterprise data stack; and that data orchestration and workflow management were going to become essential components for companies to run their day-to-day operations.
The Most Popular Data Infrastructure in the World
Five years have passed since Grand Venture’s initial investment into Astronomer, and both the company and the Airflow project have grown massively and blossomed. Airflow has become the largest and most popular data infrastructure open-source project in the world. Airflow has grown from 5K Github stars when we first invested in Astronomer to over 25K today, there are now 1900+ contributors, and is being downloaded more than 8 million times a month. Airflow is a major driver of the data management conversation, a conversation Astronomer has been leading.
Astronomer correctly predicted that a new approach was required to orchestrate the increasingly multi-varied IT environments that increasingly include multi and hybrid clouds, serverless services, continuous integration, and deployment, infrastructure-as-code, with dev and devops teams struggling to keep up with the rapid pace of change.
Open-source based technologies will continue to disrupt the enterprise software segment and in particular DevOps, the Developer Tool-Chain, as well as numerous other market sub-segments. It’s no coincidence that A16z included Astronomer in their inaugural Data50 list in the ELT & Orchestration.
A Winning Formula
Astronomer has invested heavily in innovating within the data orchestration segment via their open-source, Apache Airflow-based, approach. It started with the strong team they’ve assembled and is complemented by the incredible community they’ve developed around both Astronomer and Airflow. At Grand Ventures, we believe that the combo of team AND community is truly the winning formula for the future of open-source powered data orchestration.
Keep up the great work Astronomer! Onward and upward! 🚀🚀🚀
Note: We’re actively looking for new DevOps companies as a foundation in GVII. If you’re a founder in the DevOps company or a VC looking at deals in the space, let’s connect!
- Source: Gartner (2021)
- Source: A16z: Data50: The World’s Top Data Startups
