Prefect
Prefect Technologies builds Python-native workflow orchestration and AI infrastructure software for data, ML, and AI engineering teams, offering the open-source Prefect engine, managed Prefect Cloud, Prefect Horizon for MCP server management, and FastMCP.
- Company typePrivate
- Founded2018
- HeadquartersWashington, United States
- Headcount101–250
- GTM typeB2B
- OfferingSoftware
What Prefect does
Prefect Technologies, Inc. is a Delaware-incorporated, Washington D.C.-headquartered private company founded in 2018 by Jeremiah Lowin (a former Apache Airflow PMC member). It builds Python-native workflow orchestration and AI infrastructure software for data engineering, machine learning, and AI engineering teams. Its product portfolio centers on the Prefect open-source engine (22.7k+ GitHub stars, 12.8M+ monthly downloads), which uses decorators to turn Python functions into production-grade data pipelines with dynamic runtime, transactional orchestration (Prefect 3.0), and hybrid on-prem/cloud execution. Prefect Cloud wraps this engine in a managed SaaS with tiered pricing (Hobby free, Starter, Team, Pro, Enterprise), enterprise security (SSO, RBAC, SOC 2 Type II, PrivateLink), and autoscaling workers. Prefect Horizon extends the platform into AI infrastructure by managing Model Context Protocol (MCP) server deployment, while FastMCP (25.8k+ stars, 91M+ monthly downloads) powers an estimated 70% of MCP servers globally. ControlFlow, launched in 2024, provides a framework for orchestrating agentic LLM workflows. The company monetizes through subscription tiers, custom enterprise contracts, and a startup credits program, and it serves named enterprise customers including Cash App, Meta, NASA, Cisco, WHOOP, Ramp, Flatiron Health, Endpoint, Nitorum Capital, and Snorkel AI across financial services, healthcare, government, sports, and technology verticals. Prefect has raised approximately $60M in total disclosed funding across four rounds (most recently $14M in February 2024 from Atreides Management and Positive Sum), and conducted approximately 20 layoffs in March 2025 as part of an explicit path-to-profitability initiative.
Prefect firmographics
Firmographics- Name
- Prefect
- Legal name
- Prefect Technologies, Inc.
- Website
- https://prefect.io
- Company type
- Private
- Founded year
- 2018
- Operating status
- Operating
- Headcount range
- 101–250 employees
- Short description
- Prefect Technologies builds Python-native workflow orchestration and AI infrastructure software for data, ML, and AI engineering teams, offering the open-source Prefect engine, managed Prefect Cloud, Prefect Horizon for MCP server management, and FastMCP.
- Ownership category
- akta.pro rank
Prefect industry classification
Industry- Product category
- Workflow Orchestration Software
- NAICS
- Software Publishers (51321), Computing Infrastructure Providers, Data Processing, Web Hosting, and Related Services (518)
- SIC
- Services-Prepackaged Software (7372)
- akta.pro primary industry
- End-to-End MLOps & ML Platform Suites (HDAAABAA)
- akta.pro secondary industries
- AI/ML Solution Integration & MLOps Enablement (BPAEAAAJ), Enterprise Work Management & Collaborative Workflow Platforms (HDAEAHAI)
Keywords
Where Prefect is headquartered
LocationHeadquarters
- HQ city
- Washington
- HQ country
- United States
- HQ region
- North America
Offices2 records
Markets served
Prefect business model
Business model- GTM type
- B2B
- Offering type
- Software
- Cost components
- Personnel, Technology or R&D, Marketing or Sales, Infrastructure, Operations
Revenue model
- Prefect Cloud Subscriptions: Cloud-based managed orchestration service with tiered pricing (Hobby free, Starter, Team, Pro, Enterprise). Revenue generated from subscription fees based on workspace usage, user seats, and feature tiers.
- Prefect Horizon Subscriptions: Managed AI infrastructure product for MCP server deployment and management, offered as a subscription tier with enterprise features.
- Enterprise Licensing: Enterprise tier with custom pricing for large organizations requiring SSO, RBAC, SOC 2 Type II, audit logs, PrivateLink, and dedicated support.
- Startup Program Credits: Special pricing program offering credits on Team plan for startups with up to $20M in funding, providing a pathway to enterprise adoption.
Pricing tiers
| Model | Billing | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Freemium | Others | Free tier for hobbyists and individual developers |
| Subscription | Monthly | Starter tier for small teams beginning production use |
| Subscription | Monthly | Team tier for growing data teams |
| Subscription | Monthly | Pro tier for professional data engineering teams |
| Subscription | Annual | Enterprise tier for large organizations |
| Subscription | Annual | Startup Program offering discounts on Team plan |
Go-to-market motion3 records
Distribution channels6 records
Marketing channels10 records
Prefect product offering
Product offeringCore offering
Prefect builds and sells Python-native workflow orchestration software that turns ordinary Python functions into production-grade data pipelines using simple decorators, eliminating the need for rigid DAG definitions. The company monetizes a managed cloud platform (Prefect Cloud) with autoscaling workers and enterprise features, plus a managed AI infrastructure product (Prefect Horizon) for deploying Model Context Protocol servers that connect AI agents to business data. Underpinning both is the Apache 2.0-licensed Prefect open-source engine (22.7k+ GitHub stars) and FastMCP framework (25.8k+ stars, powering 70% of MCP servers).
Product overview
Prefect is a unified workflow orchestration and AI infrastructure platform consisting of open-source and managed components. The core is the Prefect open-source engine (22.7k+ GitHub stars) for Python-native workflow orchestration, which powers two managed platforms: Prefect Cloud for managed workflow orchestration with enterprise features, and Prefect Horizon for managed AI infrastructure via MCP. Supporting products include FastMCP (25.8k+ stars) for building MCP servers that connect AI agents to business systems, and ControlFlow for building agentic AI workflows. The platform serves data engineering, ML, and AI teams across financial services, healthcare, and technology sectors, with customers including Cash App, NASA, Cisco, and Meta.
Differentiator
Problem solved
Functional benefit
Brands
- Prefect Cloud: Managed workflow orchestration platform providing production orchestration without ops, autoscaling workers, enterprise auth, and observability.
- Prefect Open Source
- Prefect Horizon
- FastMCP
- Prefect Startup Program
Products and services
- Prefect (Open Source) Apache 2.0-licensed Python workflow orchestration engine that turns ordinary Python functions into production-grade data pipelines using @flow and @task decorators. Provides automatic state tracking, failure handling, real-time monitoring, dynamic runtime, and multi-modal (batch, event-driven, interactive, background) orchestration. Self-hosted with no vendor lock-in; 22.7k+ GitHub stars and 12.8M+ monthly downloads. Used by data engineers and ML practitioners to orchestrate pipelines across on-premises and cloud environments.
- Prefect Cloud Managed workflow orchestration platform built on Prefect open source. Provides production orchestration without operations overhead: autoscaling workers, enterprise SSO, RBAC, SOC 2 Type II compliance, observability, work pools, webhooks, service accounts, and event-driven automations. Offered via tiered pricing (Hobby free, Starter, Team, Pro, Enterprise) at app.prefect.cloud. Used by enterprise data and ML platform teams needing to scale Prefect workflows without managing infrastructure.
- Prefect Horizon Managed AI infrastructure product for deploying Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers. Includes MCP Gateway for AI agent access, Server Registry for managing MCP servers, and Governance controls (OAuth, policy). Lets AI engineering teams expose business context to AI agents (Claude, Cursor, Codex CLI, Gemini CLI) without building infrastructure. Delivered as a subscription tier at horizon.prefect.io.
- FastMCP Open-source Python framework for building Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers that connect AI agents to any system. Type-safe and production-ready. Powers 70% of MCP servers; 25.8k+ GitHub stars and 91M+ monthly downloads. Targeted at AI engineers building agentic applications that need to expose tools and data sources to LLMs.
- ControlFlow Open-source framework for building agentic AI workflows, built on top of Prefect 3.0. Allows AI engineers to orchestrate and control AI agents across multiple tasks with consistent history and context. Provides programmatic failure response and transaction rollback for agent memory to roll agents back to a clean state.
Quantifiable outcome
- 73.78% reduction in orchestration costs (Endpoint switching from Airflow)
- +4 more outcomes
Companies that use Prefect
Customer profileNamed customers14 records
Segments5 records
Ideal customer profiles4 records
Prefect technology and API
TechnologyTechnology focussed Yes
API detail
- Has API
- Yes
- API docs
- API detail
Core technology
AI maturity
App detail
Integration18 records
AI capability7 records
Feature8 records
Prefect partnerships and signals
Strategic signalPartnerships
Three partnerships are on record, tiered reference, minor and core.
- Snorkel AIreferenceSnorkel AI migrated from Redis queues to Prefect as its primary orchestration layer, using custom worker architecture for heterogeneous compute workloads including on-prem model training and reinforcement-learning evaluations. Presented at PyAI Conf 2026.
- Agentic AI Foundation (Linux Foundation)minorPrefect contributes to the Agentic AI Foundation under Linux Foundation, which includes Block, Anthropic, and OpenAI. Prefect's FastMCP framework is positioned within the MCP ecosystem governed by this foundation.
- Various Data Stack VendorscorePrefect integrates with the modern data stack including Snowflake, Databricks, dbt, Airbyte, BigQuery, AWS, Azure, GCP, and numerous other platforms. These are technical integrations enabling interoperability rather than formal partnerships.
Scale indicators13 records
Recent moves2 records
Expansion highlights5 records
Prefect competitors and assessment
Company assessmentDirect peers
- Argo Workflows: Argo Workflows is a Kubernetes-native open-source workflow engine for orchestrating parallel jobs. Comparable to Prefect for container-orchestrated workloads and Kubernetes-centric data engineering teams.
- Dagster: Dagster is a Python-native data orchestration platform with a focus on asset-centric pipelines and software-defined assets. Direct head-to-head competitor to Prefect for data engineering teams choosing between modern Python orchestrators.
- Temporal: Temporal is a durable workflow orchestration platform originally focused on microservices but increasingly used for data and ML pipelines. Comparable in offering developer-first orchestration with reliability guarantees, though targeted more broadly than data engineering.
- Kestra: Kestra is an open-source declarative data orchestration platform with YAML-based workflows and an enterprise edition. Competes with Prefect in the modern data orchestration category, especially for teams wanting declarative plus code-based flexibility.
- Flyte: Flyte is a Kubernetes-native workflow orchestration platform originally built at Lyft for ML and data pipelines. Comparable to Prefect for ML/data engineering teams, especially those standardized on Kubernetes and container-first architectures.
- Mage: Mage is an open-source data pipeline tool for transforming and integrating data with a notebook-style developer experience. Competes with Prefect in the modern Python-friendly data pipeline category targeting data engineers.
Emerging players
- LangChain: LangChain provides orchestration frameworks (LangGraph) for building LLM-powered applications and agents. Adjacent emerging player whose LangGraph orchestration competes with Prefect's ControlFlow for AI engineering teams building agentic workflows.
Broad incumbents
- Apache Airflow: Airflow is the incumbent open-source DAG-based workflow orchestrator created at Airbnb and now under the Apache Foundation. Prefect explicitly positions itself as a Pythonic alternative to Airflow (Prefect's CEO was a former Airflow PMC member) and migrates customers from it.
- AWS Step Functions: AWS Step Functions is a fully managed workflow orchestration service native to AWS. Represents the hyperscaler-bundled alternative that Prefect must displace for cloud-native workloads, especially within AWS-heavy enterprises like NASA and Cisco.
- Databricks Workflows: Databricks Workflows is a managed orchestration service tightly integrated with the Databricks Lakehouse Platform. Competes with Prefect for data and ML orchestration on Databricks, including for customers like Cash App that use both.
Market position
Strengths5 records
Weaknesses5 records
Competitive moat5 records
Key risks5 records
Key highlights7 records
Customer concentration
Prefect social profiles
Digital presencePrefect compliance and trust
Trust signalCompliance3 records
Prefect financial estimates
Financial estimateRevenue estimate
Valuation estimate
Prefect leadership team
Management profileNumber of profiles
Profiles3 records
Prefect funding detail
Funding detailFunding overview
Funding rounds4 records
Investors7 records
Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →
Prefect M&A and investment
M&A and investmentM&A2 records
Investments
M&A and investment is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →
Frequently asked questions about Prefect
What does Prefect do?
Prefect builds and sells Python-native workflow orchestration software that turns ordinary Python functions into production-grade data pipelines using simple decorators, eliminating the need for rigid DAG definitions. The company monetizes a managed cloud platform (Prefect Cloud) with autoscaling workers and enterprise features, plus a managed AI infrastructure product (Prefect Horizon) for deploying Model Context Protocol servers that connect AI agents to business data. Underpinning both is the Apache 2.0-licensed Prefect open-source engine (22.7k+ GitHub stars) and FastMCP framework (25.8k+ stars, powering 70% of MCP servers).
Is Prefect a public or private company?
Prefect is a private company. It is classified as venture growth investor backed and is currently operating.
When was Prefect founded?
Prefect was founded in 2018. It employs 101 to 250 people.
Where is Prefect based?
Prefect is headquartered in Washington, United States, in the North America region.
How does Prefect make money?
Four revenue lines are on record. Prefect Cloud Subscriptions are the primary driver. The others are prefect Horizon Subscriptions, enterprise Licensing and startup Program Credits.
Who are Prefect's main competitors?
Direct peers on record are Argo Workflows, Dagster, Temporal, Kestra, Flyte and Mage. LangChain is listed as an emerging player. Broad incumbents are Apache Airflow, AWS Step Functions and Databricks Workflows.
Does Prefect have an API?
Yes. Prefect provides a REST API for workflow orchestration, allowing developers to programmatically create, manage, and monitor flows, deployments, work pools, and automations. The API uses a three-component API_VERSION header (e.g., X-PREFECT-API-VERSION=3.2.1) for client-server communication and versioning. Prefect Cloud offers API access with service accounts for authentication, while self-hosted servers support Basic Auth. The API powers the Prefect UI, CLI, and enables programmatic workflow management. Developer documentation is at docs.prefect.io/v3/api-ref.
What industry is Prefect in?
Prefect's product category is Workflow Orchestration Software. Its primary akta.pro industry code is HDAAABAA, End-to-End MLOps & ML Platform Suites, with a secondary code of BPAEAAAJ, AI/ML Solution Integration & MLOps Enablement. Its NAICS code is 51321 and its SIC code is 7372.