Pete DeJoy on Astronomer: 292% revenue growth, a viral PR moment, and the hunt for a new CEO

Summary

Pete DeJoy, cofounder of Astronomer, is running the company in an interim CEO capacity following the departure of its previous chief executive — an exit that became one of the more unusual viral moments in enterprise software history. A Coldplay concert incident involving the former CEO generated a wave of public attention that briefly pushed Astronomer's website traffic above the New York Times. DeJoy acknowledges the company had spent eight years building a business that most people outside data engineering had never heard of, and that the episode changed that overnight.

Astronomer builds commercial infrastructure around Apache Airflow, the open-source workflow orchestration tool originally created at Airbnb. Roughly 80,000 companies use Airflow to schedule, monitor, and manage data pipelines underpinning AI and analytics workloads. The company was founded by five people in Cincinnati, followed the Databricks-and-Confluent playbook of commercialising an open-source project, and spent its early years funding product development through services and consulting contracts before bringing a cloud product to market.

In March 2025, Astronomer raised a $93 million Series D from GAIN Capital and released Airflow 3, described as the project's largest update to date. The viral moment came shortly after, and the company responded with a paid media campaign featuring Ryan Reynolds explaining Apache Airflow — a move that turned a reputational wildfire into a brand-awareness exercise. DeJoy credits the internal team for executing it under pressure, noting the company has more than 300 employees.

The commercial read-through from consumer virality to enterprise revenue is not direct. Astronomer sells to CTOs, CIOs, and chief data officers on long sales cycles, and DeJoy is careful not to overstate the pipeline impact. That said, he says the company is seeing meaningful inbound interest entering its third fiscal quarter, with the sales team fielding a high volume of calls from buyers who were previously unaware of the product. Ramp is cited as a live customer, using Astronomer to power AI workflows including fraud detection and internal sales automation.

On the CEO search, DeJoy says the board initiated a formal process immediately and he is actively supporting it while running day-to-day operations. He frames the decision as a founder's obligation to do whatever maximises the company's outcome rather than as a demotion. Astronomer is also planning a virtual conference in mid-September at which it intends to announce AI-native, consumer-oriented data engineering products.