Astronomer raises $3.5M to make data analytics more accessible

Astronomer aims to ease the pain around data analytics. Collecting data is just part of the operation. After the data has been collected, it needs to be assembled and organized and sometimes that’s the most time-consuming part of the process. Astronomer says its solution helps with this process, freeing up engineering resources to actually analyze the data.

The Cincinnati-based company has been around since 2015 and recently announced it raised $3.5M in capital led by Wireframe Ventures in San Francisco and CincyTech in Cincinnati. Other investors include Frontline Ventures (UK), Grand Ventures, Drummond Road, Core Network, M25 Group, with debt financing participation from Silicon Valley Bank. This is on top of the $1.9 million raised in seed funding from AngelPad, 500 Startups, Social Starts, and First Ascent as well as some midwestern funds.

The new capital will be used to expand Astronomer’s sales and engineer operations.

“Data engineering, which includes accessing and preparing data for analysis, takes up the vast majority of a business analyst’s time. We constantly hear the same complaint—not only is this incredibly inefficient, but the opportunity cost is tremendous. If organizations implement a focused, iterative data engineering effort, they’d free up their people to extract insights that impact the bottom line,” said Ry Walker, Co-founder and CEO of Astronomer, in a released statement.

As we wrote when covering the company’s exit from AnglePad, according to its founders, data scientists spend 90 percent of their time trying to capture and manage data, a major time sink. Meanwhile, Astronomer makes it so they need only do some light configuring to obtain the data they need on demand.