Astronomer First Used Airflow as Hidden Backend Infrastructure
Viraj Parekh · He killed a $100K ARR product & pivoted—then raised $375M. | Viraj Parekh, Co-Founder of Astronomer · PMF Show · Dec 18, 2025 · at 7:18
Viraj Parekh, co-founder of Astronomer, describes how the team first encountered and implemented Apache Airflow internally.
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“The first version we built of that product, we built that backend orchestration piece. We used a cloud native service for that, something called SWF, Simple Workflows. And that was good, but what we found was we needed something a lot more dynamic, and we needed something that gave us some more optionality. So Airbnb had just open-sourced this tool called Apache Airflow, and we were like, Hey, this looks pretty cool. Let's, let's look at a shot. So we built Airflow into the back end of our product in a way it was never exposed to customers”
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