Astronomer CEO Andy Byron [L] has resigned following vision of him snuggling with Astronomer chief people officer Kristin Cabot.
The CEO of a $1.5 billion tech firm has resigned days after and he was caught on camera embracing the company’s human resources manager at a Coldplay concern, just months after the company closed a $140 million funding round.
Andy Byron, the CEO of artificial intelligence-focused data operations firm Astronomer, was placed on leave from the company over the weekend after a video went viral showing he and Astronomer’s chief people officer Kristin Cabot with their arms around each other at a Coldplay concert.
The pair, both of whom are reportedly married to other people, were featured on the ‘Jumbotron’ big screen at the show, and when they realised, attempted to get out of the frame.
A video posted by a concertgoer quickly went viral around the world, and the pair in question were soon identified.
As one user on X wrote, the story had it all.
“This story is absolutely unremarkable except in how it managed to combine almost everything it’s socially acceptable to hate brilliantly: HR, Coldplay, cheaters, CEOs, millionaires,” they said.
Astronomer CEO Andy Byron and Astronomer chief people officer Kristin Cabot were thrust onto the Jumbotron screen at a Coldplay concert in Foxborough, US. Image: YouTube / @calebu2
Days later, a resignation
In a statement posted on the Astronomer LinkedIn page, the company said that Byron had handed in his resignation.
“Andy Byron has tendered his resignation, and the board of directors has accepted,” the statement said.
“Our leaders are expected to set the standard in both conduct and accountability, and recently, that standard was not met.”
Astronomer co-founder and chief product officer Pete DeJoy will serve as interim CEO while a search is conducted for Byron’s replacement.
Byron appears to have deleted his LinkedIn page and is no longer featured on Astronomer’s website.
The pair attempted to hide themselves. Image: YouTube / @calebu2
One former Astronomer employee posted on LinkedIn that it had been a “weird” couple of days and that he had “laughed at the memes” but that the company is “more than one moment or one person…it’s a team of smart, kind, driven people doing incredible work”.
The company before the scandal
Astronomer, which is based in New York, has about 350 employees, and was founded in 2015.
Its main product is Astro, a leading unified data ops platform built on Apache Airflow, an open-sourced tool that has grown in popularity recently.
According to the company’s own reporting, Airflow was downloaded a record 324 million+ times last year alone
Astronomer’s customers include Activision, Foot Locker, Marriot, Adobe, Electronic Arts and Trellix.
According to the company, Astro provides “one platform for your entire data pipeline lifecycle” and “unifies the complete data pipeline journey from development to running at scale with comprehensive data observability”.
The platform helps other companies to oversee, build and scale data pathways.
The company in May closed a $140 million ($US93 million) Series D funding round, led by Bain Capital Ventures, alongside Salesforce Ventures and a number of existing investors.
The funding will be used to hasten Astronomer’s research and development, and to strategically expand the firm’s international presence.
At the time, Byron told VentureBeat in an interview that these expansion plans included Australia and New Zealand.
“For us, this is just a step along the way,” Byron said in the interview in May.
“We want to build something awesome here. I couldn’t be more excited about our venture partners, our customers, our product vision, which I think is super strong in going after collapsing the data ops market.”
According to the company, Astronomer enjoyed 150 per cent year-on-year growth in terms of annual recurring revenue in the last financial year.
The funding round reportedly gave the tech company a valuation of $1.5 billion ($US1 billion).
But now the tech firm is best known for the Coldplay incident, which went viral around the world.
“Before this week, we were known as a pioneer in the data ops space,” the company’s LinkedIn statement said.
“While awareness of our company may have changed overnight, our product and our work for our customers have not.
“We’re continuing to do what we do best: helping our customers with their toughest data and AI problems.”