I am thrilled to announce the creation of The Astro Technology Company along with $7M in seed funding to help us build a better platform for web development. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from Haystack, Gradient, and Uncorrelated Ventures.

With this funding, the core team has moved from Skypack (formerly Pika) and joined The Astro Technology Company to continue working on Astro, growing our open source community, and driving towards our upcoming v1.0 release.

What is Astro?

Astro is a modern web build tool that helps you build fast websites, faster. Astro leverages a technique called partial hydration to automatically eliminate unused JavaScript from your site, often reducing your overall payload by 90% or more. This makes Astro the perfect choice for content-focused websites like ecommerce, marketing, and blogs.

Astro offers a modern, HTML-based component syntax that works across frameworks. React, Preact, Svelte, and Vue are all supported. Your existing components will continue to work in Astro. You can even mix frameworks when you need to, preventing that expensive rewrite when The Next Big Thing™️ comes along.

The Astro open source project launched in June 2021 and captured immediate buzz, taking home the “Ecosystem Innovation Award” at the 2021 Jamstack Awards. Today, Astro supports 10,000+ users including developers at Google, Netlify, Firebase, DivRIOTS, and Monogram. The project is still young, but we have accomplished so much in such little time!

What does this funding mean for Astro users?

This funding will allow our team to continue to focus full-time on Astro, improving the developer experience and investing more resources towards our amazing ecosystem of 10,000+ users and 3,000+ community members.

Astro is and will always be MIT-licensed. Our team has decades of combined open-source experience leading and maintaining projects like Skypack, Snowpack, Polymer, Microsite, Haunted, and PostCSS. I can’t over-state just how important open source software is to this team and we will continue to support a healthy open source ecosystem.

Astro will continue to operate as an open source community project. We will continue to grow our sponsorship on Open Collective and invest in our amazing partners and sponsors. 100% of collected funds will continue to go directly back to our open source community members.

Our goal is to grow Astro into the next great platform for web developers. We see Astro as so much more than just a build tool, and this funding will give us the resources to realize that vision. I can’t wait to share more about what we have planned for Astro over the next year!

Join us!

Love web development? Love developer tooling? Love the thought of working with talented, thoughtful people full-time? We’re hiring!

You can also join us on Discord to learn more about Astro and the community behind it.