Prefect

prefect.io

HQ: Washington, District of Columbia, United States

200

Technology

Company research

Public company, workplace, funding, and market signals

Updated Aug 16, 2026

Overview

Prefect is a Washington, D.C.-based software company building open-source and commercial workflow-orchestration infrastructure for data, machine-learning, and AI workloads. Its platform helps teams define Python workflows and run them reliably with scheduling, retries, observability, state management, deployment, and recovery.

Primary product

Prefect Cloud and the open-source Prefect workflow-orchestration framework

Founded

2018

Headquarters

Washington, D.C., United States

Team size

40-50

Work style

Remote

Industry

Data infrastructure and analytics

Sub-industry

Developer tools, workflow orchestration, data engineering, MLOps, and AI infrastructure

Offices

Washington, D.C. headquarters

New York City customer/community workspace or coworking location

California destination workspace/retreat (described by Prefect as an experimental team space rather than a permanent office)

Business model

Open-core software

Software-as-a-service

Enterprise software subscriptions

Self-hosted open-source software

Usage- and seat-based cloud plans

Funding

Stage

Privately held, post-Series B; later convertible-note financing reported

Total raised

$60M

Latest round

Convertible note · Feb 2024

Latest amount

$14M

Convertible note

Feb 2024

$14M

Series B

Jun 2021 · Tiger Global Management

$32M

Series A

Feb 2021 · Positive Sum / Patrick O'Shaughnessy

$11.5M

Debt financing / conventional debt

Dec 2019

$2.5M

People & investors

Leadership

Jeremiah Lowin

Founder and CEO

Chris White

President and Chief Technology Officer

Sarah Moses

Chief Operating Officer

Adam Azzam

VP of Product

Bradley Evans

Managing Director of People

Shane Nordstrand

Head of Sales

Kelsea Moravec

VP, Strategy and Operations

George Coyne

Director of Engineering, GTM

Jennifer G.

Head of Engineering

Edward Park

Director of Engineering

Investors

Anthony Goldbloom

Atreides Management

Bessemer Venture Partners

Tiger Global Management

Valor Equity Partners

Zach Weinberg

Work & culture

Prefect describes itself as remote-first, distributed, high-performance, autonomous, and mission-driven. Public company material emphasizes trust, craftsmanship, high agency, direct customer engagement, constructive disagreement, and a blameless approach in which teams debug systems rather than individuals. The company has also emphasized sustainable, profitable, customer-funded growth.

Work style

Remote

Compensation

Public evidence located in this research did not establish standardized company-wide salary bands or equity ranges. Compensation should be checked role by role in current job postings or with recruiting.

Benefits

Remote-first working environment

Unlimited paid time off

11 company holidays

Monthly remote-work stipend; Prefect has publicly described amounts of up to $800 per month in recruiting/culture material

$500 home-office setup benefit

Internet stipend

Medical, dental, and vision insurance

401(k) with 5% match and no vesting period

Flexible spending accounts

Life and disability insurance

Parental leave

Professional-development funding for courses, certifications, and conferences

Charitable donation matching up to $500

Company gatherings

Product & market

Pricing

Open-source Prefect is free to self-host. Prefect Cloud offers a free Hobby tier and paid plans primarily based on users/seats, workspaces, deployments, and included serverless compute; enterprise pricing is custom. The public pricing page lists a $100/month tier and $100/user/month pricing for certain plans, with enterprise features and pricing negotiated.

Differentiators

—Python-native workflow definitions using ordinary functions and @flow/@task decorators
—Dynamic control flow without requiring a rigid, predeclared DAG
—Retries, caching, state management, observability, logging, scheduling, and recovery built into the orchestration layer
—Portable deployment model supporting cloud, containers, Kubernetes, and self-hosted infrastructure
—Open-source framework paired with a managed cloud control plane
—Enterprise controls including SSO, RBAC, audit logging, hybrid architecture, SOC 2 Type II certification, and a stated 99.99% uptime SLA
—Developer-friendly migration path from scripts, cron jobs, and homegrown orchestration
—Growing focus on AI-agent workflows, assets, and governed tool access through the broader Prefect/FastMCP portfolio

Technology

Python

Prefect 3

Prefect Cloud

Prefect Server

AnyIO

asyncio

PostgreSQL

SQLite

Docker

Kubernetes

AWS

Amazon ECS

Amazon S3

Google Cloud

Azure

Snowflake

dbt

PySpark

Dask

Ray

Customers

WHOOP

Ramp

Cash App

Progressive

Humana

Blackstone

Arrowstreet

Schonfeld

Recursion

Foundry

Rent the Runway

Cox Automotive

Clearcover

Flatiron Health

Seven.One Entertainment / Joyn

Competitors

Apache Airflow

Astronomer

Dagster

Dagster+

Metaflow

Mage

Kestra

Temporal

Kubeflow

Google Cloud Composer

Scale & contact

Estimated revenue

$1 million-$10 million annually; one third-party estimate is approximately $8 million

Estimated monthly visits

175K

Traffic estimate as of Jun 2026

Signals & risks

Layoff

Mar 2025

Founder and CEO Jeremiah Lowin said Prefect restructured into a profitable, customer-funded organization and parted ways with 20 employees. This is a material reduction relative to reported current headcount.

Source

Acquisition

Jul 2026

Prefect announced an agreement to acquire Dagster Labs. The companies said Dagster and Dagster+ would remain distinct products, but the transaction introduces integration, product-roadmap, customer-retention, and organizational-execution risks. Financial terms were not disclosed in the official announcement.

Source

Other

Feb 2024

A $14 million convertible-note financing is reported by multiple startup databases, but the financing was not found in a clearly attributable Prefect primary announcement. Total-funding figures therefore vary across databases.

Source

Latest news

Prefect announces acquisition of Dagster Labs

Prefect · Jul 2026

Prefect announced an agreement to acquire Dagster Labs, positioning Prefect's durable execution, Dagster's declarative data-asset model, and FastMCP's governed tool access as a combined platform for AI-agent orchestration. The official announcement says Dagster and Dagster+ will remain distinct products and that many Dagster employees will join Prefect.

Chris White becomes President of Prefect

Prefect · Aug 2025

Prefect formalized longtime CTO Chris White's broader operating role by appointing him President while retaining his technical leadership. The announcement emphasized execution, clarity, and extending Prefect's blameless culture beyond engineering.

Prefect introduces assets and materialization tracking

Prefect · Jun 2025

Prefect introduced assets and the @materialize concept for tracking outputs, relationships, and lineage for workflows and agents, expanding the platform beyond operational run orchestration toward data and decision lineage.

Prefect restructures and parts ways with 20 employees