There’s a new leader at the helm of one of Cincinnati’s top venture-backed startups. The hire follows two rounds of layoffs at the company this year in a three-month span. But there’s cautious optimism in the planned path forward, he said.
Andy Byron, a Boston-based tech executive, was named Astronomer’s newest CEO, effective toward the end of July. He’s the third to hold the title this calendar year.
Byron succeeds Scott Yara, a managing director at Palo Alto-based Sutter Hill Ventures, and previously, Joe Otto, who ran the company for a nearly five-year stretch.
Yara and Otto both remain on the board.
Byron spent several months prior learning about Astronomer as a newly appointed entrepreneur-in-residence at Sutter Hill, an Astronomer backer. Prior, he had served as the president at San Jose-based cybersecurity startup Lacework, another Sutter Hill portfolio company. It last raised a $1.3 billion funding round in 2021.
Byron said he saw huge opportunity at Astronomer – despite the company making two rounds of layoffs in January and April, respectively.
The company shed roughly 176 jobs in the process, more than half its headcount. It’s now back up to a team of 200 and hiring.
Prior to the cuts, Astronomer had achieved rare unicorn status for a Cincinnati startup. It’s raised nearly $290 million in venture funding, including a $213 million Series C in March 2022.
“There have definitely been ups and downs. Hopefully we've turned a corner,” Byron told me. “Like most companies, Astronomer overstretched itself in terms of hiring. It needed to be restructured.
“Right now, everything's looking forward,” he added. “We’re in the early innings, but there's a lot of good news happening in the company.”
Astronomer is a modern data orchestrator; it helps companies manage their large sums of data, breaking down silos to make the information more accessible across an entire organization. It’s powered by Apache Airflow, an open-source platform.
Apache Airflow continues to grow by leaps and bounds. Its logged 73 million downloads, a 66% year-over-year increase, and the Airflow community has surpassed 2,500 contributors.
Byron said all the buzz around generative AI and language models is serving as a big driver.
Astronomer also recently released Astro, a cloud-based modern data orchestration platform, and that is gaining even more significant traction, Byron said.
In a press release, Astronomer said revenue for Astro increased by 206% year-over-year, while platform usage increased by 1,400% in the first half of 2023.
Organizations around the world, including Conde Nast, Electronic Arts, FanDuel and many more, have implemented Astro to power their data pipelines.
“(Astro) is definitely hitting the mark,” Byron said. “And the Airflow community is growing faster than almost any other open-source community in history – the amount of data being produced is tenfold compared to what it was even a few years ago, and Airflow is right in the middle of that phenomenon.”
To accommodate its growth, Astronomer will look at add to its team - with caution. “It's definitely measured; it's definitely not growth at all costs,” Byron said.
The plan is to hire between 30 and 40 people by the end of the year in areas such as product, engineering and go-to-market.
Cincinnati will remain a key focus, he said. Astronomer, founded in 2015, is headquartered at the Strietmann Center on 12th Street in Over-the-Rhine.
The company also considers the New York City region and the San Francisco Bay area as hubs, although its team is widely distributed.
“Cincinnati is one of those key areas that we're going to hire in; we're going to continue to invest in Cincinnati,” Byron said. “I do think having a presence in the city the company was founded is important. It’s important to myself, it's important to our investors, and frankly, it's important to the original leadership team, too.”
