Woah! Unicorn Founder Quits Unicorn During $213M Raise, Launches Something Bigger

Ry Walker, serial entrepreneur and founder of Tembo.io, walked away from his first company, Astronomer.io (yes the Coldplay one) during their $213 million Series C in 2022. The company was doing tens of millions in revenue. Now, he's building Tembo.io, an AI developer teammate that's already processing 1,000+ merged pull requests for 200 organizations just 2 months after pivoting. He previously co-founded Astronomer in 2015, which has raised $380-390 million total and is now estimated at $80-100 million ARR, but took a rare secondary exit in 2022 to return to his true passion: early-stage building. In this episode, Ry reveals how he went from zero to 30 paying customers in 60 days, why he believes AI agents will 10x the software development market, and his strategy to land million-dollar Fortune 50 contracts by letting non-technical teams create pull requests without bothering their developers.