Dagster was founded in 2018 by Nick Schrock in San Francisco. Schrock previously co-created GraphQL at Facebook (now Meta) and brought a similar philosophy to data orchestration: strong type systems, clear contracts between components, and developer-first tooling.
Dagster introduced the concept of software-defined assets — a fundamentally different way to think about data pipelines. Instead of defining workflows as sequences of tasks (the approach used by Airflow and most orchestrators), Dagster lets engineers declare the data assets they want to produce and how those assets depend on each other. The framework then figures out what to execute and when.
Dagster+ (formerly Dagster Cloud) is the commercial managed service that handles deployment, monitoring, and scaling. It supports serverless execution where compute resources spin up only when pipelines run, as well as hybrid deployment where code executes in the customer’s own infrastructure.
The open-source project has earned more than 11,000 GitHub stars and has a growing community of contributors. Dagster integrates with tools across the modern data stack: dbt for transformations, Fivetran and Airbyte for ingestion, Snowflake and BigQuery for warehousing, and various ML frameworks.
Elementl, the company behind Dagster, raised $33 million in Series B funding in 2022 from investors including Insight Partners. The company serves hundreds of organizations, from early-stage startups to enterprise data teams.
Schrock remains CEO and is a respected voice in the data engineering community. The company employs approximately 100 people and competes directly with Airflow, Prefect, and other orchestration tools.
