Every modern enterprise today faces the same reality: data infrastructure is sprawling, fragmented and fragile. Without a robust orchestration layer to coordinate the movement and transformation of data across systems, workflows break down, insights stall and agility suffers.

In 2015, at Airbnb, a group of engineers faced this firsthand. Their pipelines were becoming unmanageable - duct-taped together by brittle cron jobs and custom scripts. They needed something better - a system that could orchestrate data workflows at scale with clarity, reliability and flexibility.

From that need, Apache Airflow was born. And what started as an internal tool quietly exploded into one of the most important open-source projects of the last decade. Today, 80,000 organizations - from Tesla to Netflix to Stripe - rely on Airflow to keep their businesses running.

But success brought new complexity. Airflow was powerful - but not easy. Running it at scale meant wrangling Kubernetes clusters, managing upgrades, handling observability, security and compliance across clouds and teams. The world needed more than open-source Airflow. It needed Airflow to be enterprise-ready.

Enter Astronomer. Founded in 2018 on a mission to deliver the world's data, Astronomer offers enterprises a way to run, scale and extend Airflow - without drowning in operational overhead.

At Bain Capital Ventures, we’ve long believed that orchestration would become the foundational control plane for the data-driven enterprise - much like Kubernetes did for cloud infrastructure. Today, we are thrilled to deepen our partnership with Astronomer, a leading enterprise platform built around Apache Airflow, the open-source standard for data orchestration.

From Workflow Automation to Infrastructure Control Plane

Apache Airflow has become one of the most successful open-source projects in history, now used by over 80,000 organizations and surpassing 31 million downloads per month. It’s the underlying engine orchestrating critical data pipelines at companies like AirBnB, LinkedIn and Uber.

Airflow’s success stems from its flexibility and power. But at scale, running Airflow requires operational excellence: Kubernetes deployment, DAG optimization, multi-tenant management, observability, security and high-availability architectures.

Astronomer’s Astro platform abstracts away this complexity. It offers enterprises:

• Instant Airflow deployment without Kubernetes expertise
• Auto-scaling, resource isolation and multi-tenancy across teams and pipelines
• AI-powered observability and failure prediction with Astro Observe
• Enterprise-grade security, hybrid and multi-cloud support, and rapid version upgrades

Astro transforms Airflow from a workflow scheduler into a cloud-native, enterprise orchestration platform - the orchestration control plane for the modern data stack.

A Bigger Vision: The Rise of the Data Control Plane

In every modern enterprise, the data stack has fractured into dozens of tools: ingestion (Fivetran), storage (Snowflake), transformation (dbt), machine learning (Vertex AI), observability (Monte Carlo). Each solves a piece of the puzzle. But no one sees the whole picture.

Except the orchestrator.

Orchestration isn’t just about scheduling workflows. It’s about governing the full lifecycle of data movement, transformation and insight. It's the natural control plane - the one layer that touches everything.

Astronomer sees this clearly. They're expanding Astro beyond workflow automation into:

• Observability (with Astro Observe)
• Transformation orchestration (via dbt Core integration)
• AI/ML pipeline management
• Data governance and lineage

In short, Astronomer is turning orchestration into a full DataOps platform - and reshaping how enterprises manage their most critical asset: their data.

A Team Built for the Journey

We first invested in Astronomer back in 2019, drawn by the early potential of Airflow and the team's deep technical roots.

It hasn’t been a straight line. Like many great open-source commercialization stories, Astronomer navigated leadership changes, market shifts and tough lessons in scaling.

But under Andy Byron and the new leadership team, Astronomer has found its rhythm with execution discipline, deep product credibility and a relentless focus on the customer. Together, they’ve built a platform - and a company - ready for the next era.

Why We’re All-In on Astronomer

At Bain Capital Ventures, we believe the next decade of enterprise infrastructure will be defined not by more tools - but by better control.

We believe Astronomer has the rare opportunity to define the orchestration layer for the modern enterprise - and, in doing so, to unify the fractured, brittle data stack into something more reliable, agile and intelligent.

They aren’t just commercializing Airflow. They are building the Data Control Plane for the future. We couldn’t be more excited to deepen our partnership with Astronomer and support them on this journey.

If you’re orchestrating the future of your business, Astronomer is ready to help. Learn more here.