Elementl Raises $33M to Grow Dagster

The new capital will accelerate the development and adoption of Dagster, the open-source, cloud-native data orchestrator.

Today, Elementl is pleased to announce the close of its $33mm series B led by Georgian with participation by new investors 8VC, Human Capital, Hanover, and existing investors Sequoia, Index, Amplify and Slow. The new capital will accelerate the development and adoption of Dagster, the open-source, cloud-native data orchestrator.

“We are thrilled to partner with Georgian as we enter this next stage of growth for the company. We continue to see strong adoption of Dagster, both as an open-source solution and as a commercial Cloud offering,” said Pete Hunt, CEO at Elementl.

Note: In August 2023 Elementl, Inc. was renamed **[Dagster Labs](/blog/introducing-dagster-labs)**.

Machine learning, data science, and business analytics are revolutionizing businesses of all sizes across every industry. But data and machine learning teams struggle to manage the complexity of their data pipelines and infrastructure.

Data orchestration is the foundation of the data platform, and is responsible for defining, running, observing and deploying data pipelines. However, most solutions for data orchestration do not embrace modern engineering standards, nor do they support the full development lifecycle, leaving data and machine learning teams struggling to adopt best practices such as DevOps.

While senior leaders see the transformational potential of new data applications and feel the urgency to adopt these new capabilities in their business, data teams cannot move fast enough to get these into production.

Founded by Nick Schrock in 2018, Elementl is building the Dagster open-source project to solve these problems and unlock the enormous potential value of data in industries such as insurance, finance, healthcare, biotech, retail, and academia. Dagster Cloud, Elementl’s first commercial product, launched to General Availability in the summer of 2022 and empowered Dagster open-source users with additional capabilities such as branch deployments, enterprise access control, and a variety of hosted options including Hybrid and Serverless.

Despite the challenging macroeconomic environment, the data category has remained strong.

“We're excited to partner with the Elementl team, and we see Dagster as a critical enabler for data teams looking to build robust, high-performing data pipelines and machine learning applications. Our R&D team adopted Dagster for data orchestration over a year ago after an evaluation of the solutions in the space. We've been impressed with how Dagster has accelerated our Engineering team's productivity and ability to efficiently ship production-grade data pipelines.” said Emily Walsh, lead investor at Georgian.

The new capital will allow Elementl to scale go-to-market activities and continue its rapid product evolution.

“Dagster was built from the ground up to provide a transformative developer experience while supporting the most demanding use cases in data engineering. Our unique abstractions and asset-first approach are really resonating with data practitioners, and we're seeing this play out in our key growth metrics,” said Nick Schrock, founder and CTO at Elementl.

The adoption of Dagster has grown rapidly since the GA release. In the last twelve months:

The number of active Dagster projects has tripled.
The Dagster open-source community has grown by over 3X.
Community participation on GitHub has doubled, with more users contributing code, ideas and issue comments.

Global businesses including Doordash, Flexport, and Aritzia are choosing Dagster for everything from deploying ETL pipelines for analytics teams, all the way to developing production machine learning models that are core to their products.

Dagster is not just the emerging leader in greenfield data platforms. It is increasingly attracting users who are migrating off of legacy technologies such as Apache Airflow. In January, the Elementl team lowered the barrier to migrating by releasing new tooling which allows users to run data pipelines written for Apache Airflow directly on Dagster.

One example of such a migration is the technology-driven financial services company Group 1001. With the new tooling, they were able to migrate all of their Airflow pipelines to Dagster in just two weeks. In doing so, they achieved much faster development velocity to help meet the organization's data requirements. “We can deliver more insight, and we can deliver faster value. Because speed is what we care about,” said Gu Xie, Head of Data Engineering at Group 1001.

Interested parties can try out Dagster for free by either running the open-source project, or signing up for a trial at https://dagster.io/

For more information please contact:

Elementl: Fraser Marlow, Head of Marketing, fraser@elementl.com

Georgian: David Poole, Head of Marketing, david@georgian.io

About Elementl

Elementl was founded on the vision of bringing much-needed improvements to the domain of data engineering by tackling some of the more challenging components of the toolset. Elementl’s first endeavor was Dagster, a fundamental reinvention of data orchestration, starting from first principles and introducing opinionated and innovative approaches. Elementl was founded in 2018 by Nick Schrock, who currently serves as CTO after appointing Pete Hunt CEO in November 2022.

About Georgian

At Georgian, we invest in high-growth B2B software companies that harness the power of data in a trustworthy way. Our technology platform identifies and accelerates the best growth-stage software companies. We believe that a digital approach can provide a better experience of growth capital to software company CEOs and their teams. Based in Toronto, Georgian’s team brings together software entrepreneurs, machine learning experts, experienced operators and investment professionals.