Prefect
Headquarters
Washington, DCFounded
2018CEO / Founder
Jeremiah LowinEmployees
51-200Funding
Series B — $32.9MProducts
1 product listedAvg. AI Score
7.9/10Website
prefect.io/
Profile updated
About Prefect
Prefect is a workflow orchestration company headquartered in Washington, DC, founded in 2018 by Jeremiah Lowin. The company builds tooling for data engineers and developers to define, schedule, and observe data pipelines and automated workflows, with an open-source library at its core and a managed cloud platform layered on top.
Prefect's primary product is its Python-based orchestration framework, which allows teams to convert existing Python functions into observable, retriable workflows. The company offers Prefect Cloud, a hosted platform for managing workflow runs, and has more recently introduced Prefect Horizon, aimed at supporting AI application workflows. The open-source project has accumulated significant adoption on GitHub and is used across data engineering, machine learning, and analytics teams.
Prefect raised a $32.9M Series B round, with prior funding from investors including Andreessen Horowitz and others. The company operates with a remote-first team and competes in the workflow orchestration space alongside products such as Apache Airflow, Dagster, and Astronomer.
Specialties
Financials
Dated, source-cited figures. Estimates are marked.
Products by Prefect
All products by Prefect reviewed by our AI panel of experts.
How Our Review Panel Scores Prefect
Six independent reviewer personalities assessed Prefect's product on their own terms. They disagreed by 1.0 points — The Finance Lead was the hardest to convince, The Domain Practitioner the most positive.
Averaged across 1 reviewed product in our catalog. Scores are out of 10.
Competitive Landscape
Who Prefect competes with, and how they differ.
Astronomer sells a managed Apache Airflow service built on Airflow's older scheduler/webserver/worker architecture and its 1,000+ community provider ecosystem, versus Prefect's Python-native @flow/@task model and hybrid execution where only a lightweight agent runs on customer infrastructure.
Kestra defines workflows in declarative YAML rather than Python, making it language-agnostic (Python, SQL, Bash, or anything that runs in a Docker container) and easier to hand to non-Python engineers, where Prefect stays Python-only via decorated functions.
1 product reviewed on TopReviewedTemporal is a language-agnostic durable-execution engine that replays event-sourced history to recover mid-workflow, aimed at mission-critical microservices like payments and order fulfillment, whereas Prefect is Python-only and durable at the task/run level (retries, caching) without mid-function replay.
Company Timeline
Key milestones in Prefect's history, with sources.
- Funding
$65.3M securities offering disclosed via SEC Form D
Prefect Technologies filed a Form D with the SEC reporting a fully-subscribed $65,330,314 securities offering with a first-sale date of August 14, 2026, roughly a month after announcing the Dagster acquisition.
sec.gov - Acquisition
Prefect acquires Dagster Labs
Prefect agreed to acquire Dagster Labs, uniting the two most widely adopted post-Apache-Airflow workflow orchestrators; about 40 Dagster staff joined Prefect while Dagster and Dagster+ continue as independently branded products under founder Nick Schrock and CEO Pete Hunt as advisors.
pulse2.com - Launch
Prefect 3.0 reaches general availability
Prefect shipped the general-availability release of Prefect 3.0, a fully event-driven engine with a transactions API that the company said was roughly 10x faster than Prefect 2.0.
prefect.io - Launch
Prefect 2.0 (Orion engine) reaches general availability
The stable Prefect 2.0 release shipped on PyPI, powered by the new asynchronous "Orion" engine and removing the requirement that workflows be written as static DAGs.
pypi.org - Funding
Series B — $32M led by Tiger Global Management
Prefect raised a $32 million Series B led by Tiger Global Management with Bessemer Venture Partners joining and Positive Sum returning, brought on to scale the dataflow automation platform.
prnewswire.com - Funding
Series A — $11.5M led by Positive Sum
Prefect announced an $11.5 million Series A led by Patrick O'Shaughnessy of Positive Sum, with participation from Valor Equity Partners, Atreides, and individual investors including GitHub CEO Nat Friedman.
prnewswire.com - Launch
Prefect Cloud reaches public availability
Prefect Cloud, the company's hosted orchestration control plane built on its hybrid execution model, became publicly available, capping what the company called "Phase 1" of its product story.
medium.com - Funding
Seed financing — $2.5M disclosed via SEC Form D
Prefect Technologies, Inc. filed a Form D with the SEC for a $2.5 million securities offering with a first-sale date of December 10, 2019, its first disclosed institutional financing.
sec.gov - Founded
Prefect founded; open-source project published on GitHub
Jeremiah Lowin, who had previously worked on Apache Airflow, founded Prefect Technologies, Inc. (Delaware) in 2018; the PrefectHQ/prefect open-source repository was created on GitHub on June 29, 2018.
github.com
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