Prefect, the maker of critical AI and data automation software, today announced that it has agreed to acquire Dagster Labs, creators of the widely popular Dagster orchestrator. The transaction brings together the two most widely adopted successors to Apache Airflow, creating a combined suite of products that serves thousands of data teams running production workloads across data pipelines, ML operations, and AI agent infrastructure. The combination gives engineering teams one place to automate their most important work, from data pipelines to agentic workflows.
Prefect acquires Dagster, uniting the two leading modern orchestrators.
Prefect runs the work and governs agents through FastMCP; Dagster brings declarative asset-based model.
FastMCP downloaded 92M+ times in last month with 26,000+ GitHub stars.
Dagster founder Nick Schrock and CEO Pete Hunt to serve as strategic advisors.
Both products retain names, open-source licenses, and roadmaps with continued investment.
Prefect has operated profitably for the past year.
Jeremiah Lowin, founder and CEO of Prefect, stated: "For years, Prefect and Dagster raised the bar for each other, and as a result, we built two of the most popular tools in the data ecosystem. Together, we're consolidating the category around our shared vision while also building the best foundation for the next generation of AI automation."
Pete Hunt, CEO of Dagster, added: "Prefect and Dagster are the two orchestrators the market turned to as it moved past Airflow, and putting them under one roof creates the clear leader in next-generation orchestration. Prefect is one of the only companies that could credibly keep building Dagster and supporting Dagster customers for the long term."
FastMCP holds a position in the agent ecosystem that no other orchestration company occupies. It has been downloaded more than 92 million times in the last month and has earned over 26,000 GitHub stars, making it the default way to connect AI agents to external tools and data. Prefect shipped it the weekend after Anthropic announced the Model Context Protocol, and Anthropic adopted it as the official MCP SDK.
Both products receive long-term support and continued investment. Dagster and Dagster+ keep their names, open-source license, and roadmap. Pricing for both Prefect Cloud and Dagster+ is unchanged. Open-source Prefect and open-source Dagster both continue to receive maintenance releases, new features, and security patches. Teams running either product in production can stay exactly where they are.
The combined engineering team will concentrate on three areas: a full-stack approach to agentic automation combining Prefect's runtime execution, FastMCP's governed agent access, and Dagster's declarative outcomes; moving reliability upstream into the layer that runs the work; and pairing Prefect's flexibility with Dagster's declarative model for both natural code writing and rigorous outcome reasoning.
About Prefect
Prefect builds critical AI and data automation software that engineering teams use to run and observe mission-critical workflows at scale. Its portfolio spans Prefect for durable workflow and agent execution, Dagster for asset-based orchestration and data lineage, and FastMCP for connecting and governing AI agents through the Model Context Protocol. Founded in 2018 and headquartered in Washington, D.C., Prefect has operated profitably for the past year.
