Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More
Astronomer, the company behind the Apache Airflow-powered data orchestration platform Astro, has secured $93 million in Series D funding as enterprises increasingly seek to operationalize AI initiatives through better management of their data pipelines.
The funding round was led by Bain Capital Ventures, with participation from Salesforce Ventures and existing investors including Insight, Meritech, and Venrock. Bosch Ventures is also seeking to participate in the round, reflecting industrial interest in the technology.
In an exclusive interview with VentureBeat, Astronomer CEO Andy Byron explained that the company will use the funding to expedite research and development efforts and expand its global footprint, particularly in Europe, Australia, and New Zealand.
“For us, this is just a step along the way,” Byron said. “We want to build something awesome here. I couldn’t be more excited about our venture partners, our customers, our product vision, which I think is super strong in going after collapsing the data ops market.”
How data orchestration became the hidden key to enterprise AI success
The funding targets what industry analysts have identified as the “AI implementation gap” — the significant technical and organizational hurdles that prevent companies from deploying AI at scale. Data orchestration, the process of automating and coordinating complex data workflows across disparate systems, has become an essential component of successful AI deployments.
Enrique Salem, Partner at Bain Capital Ventures, explained the critical challenges facing enterprises today: “Every company operates a sprawling, fragmented data ecosystem—using a patchworks of tools, teams, and workflows that struggle to deliver reliable insights, creating operational bottlenecks and limiting agility. At the heart of this complexity is orchestration—the layer that coordinates all these moving pieces.”
Salem noted that despite its importance, “today’s orchestration landscape is where cloud infrastructure was 15 years ago: mission critical, yet fragmented, brittle and often built in-house with limited scalability. Data engineers spend more time maintaining pipelines than driving innovation. Without robust orchestration, data is unreliable, agility is lost, and businesses fall behind.”
The company’s platform, Astro, is built on Apache Airflow, an open-source framework that has seen explosive growth. According to the company’s recently released State of Airflow 2025 report, which surveyed over 5,000 data practi …