One year ago, I reorganized Prefect to operate as a sustainable, customer-funded business. It was a complicated and, in some ways, painful decision. But I believed it was in the best interests of our company, and the right foundation for what was clearly becoming a seismic shift in what it means to build software. I wrote at the time: “A startup can do extraordinary things when it doesn’t operate under the shadow of its next fundraise.”
We have endeavored to live up to that charge.
I am delighted to share that over the last 12 months, Prefect has crossed profitability milestone after milestone, and today generates free cash flow even after a significant investment in our new AI business. Three of the last four quarters set ARR growth records for our data platform. And our roadmap is increasingly focused on solving core problems for our customers in innovative and impactful ways.
At Prefect, we build software that takes complicated things and makes them simple. We did it for the data layer, and now we’re doing it for the context layer as well: the infrastructure that connects AI agents to the data, tools, and workflows they need to be useful. We earn the right to get hired by our customers because we solve real problems, and this is the biggest problem we’ve ever gone after.
By now, you’ve probably heard of FastMCP. You might’ve even assumed it’s part of a different company. A lot of people do. I think that assumption reflects a belief that you can’t do something like this — go all-in on a new protocol, build the dominant open-source framework, and ship a symbiotic enterprise platform — from inside a company known for a different product. But we saw an opportunity, and we had the stability to seize it and the conviction to stay with it. Today, Prefect Cloud powers a profitable and growing data business. Prefect Horizon is the next frontier.
A year ago, I wrote that a modern startup should be “resilient, independent, and focused entirely on creating value for its users.” Today I’d expand on that. Resilient means profitable. Independent means taking advantage of that position to make asymmetric bets. And focused means attacking them with every tool available — including AI, which has of course become a core part of how our small team operates.
None of this happens without a team willing to bet on something when the path forward wasn’t obvious. I’m proud of what they’ve built, and grateful for their efforts to do more than just “sustain” this company.