How Welbee's Edu Intelligence Leverages Astro to Empower Educators with Secure, AI-Driven Insight

The Customer

Welbee is an education technology company, and Edu Intelligence is its flagship product helping schools, districts, and international institutions harness the power of their data to improve student and staff outcomes. The platform securely integrates multiple data sources—from attendance to wellbeing—augmented with stakeholder feedback from parents, staff, and students. By layering advanced AI designed specifically for education, Edu Intelligence enables decision makers to ask natural language questions and instantly gain actionable insights.

The technical team is led by Chief Product & Technology Officer Tim Handley who is a former head teacher (principal in the UK) and brings an educator’s perspective directly into EdTech leadership. As Tim explains, “Our mission is to give school leaders back time and clarity so they can focus on improving student and staff wellbeing, not spreadsheets.”

Edu Intelligence AI platform in action

The Challenge

For Welbee, slow and unreliable orchestration meant delays in getting insights to educators and missed opportunities to improve student outcomes. Tim and his team struggled with limitations in their orchestration layer, spending too much time wrestling with scaling issues, visibility gaps, and AI workflow bottlenecks when analyzing large volumes of data across fragmented systems.

As Tim explains, “The version of Airflow that GCC [Google Cloud Composer] provided was more limited, and we started to run up against scaling issues. We must run our sensitive data in isolated environments which requires a lot of workers. In addition, it was challenging to troubleshoot when things went wrong, especially with transformations performed by dbt Core.” These bottlenecks slowed insight delivery and constrained the team’s ability to expand data offerings and AI-driven use cases.

Required Capabilities

Tim emphasized that the team needed a more extensible version of Airflow that could handle massive parallel transformations across thousands of siloed datasets. “We needed clear end-to-end visibility for faster troubleshooting, tighter integration with dbt Core, BigQuery, and Vertex AI, and event-driven orchestration to trigger workflows only when needed,” he explained. Security and multi-tenant isolation were also non-negotiable to protect sensitive student data.

The Solution

Welbee migrated to Astronomer’s Astro platform, enabling full-featured Airflow with dbt Core orchestration. Astro now provides scalability for thousands of siloed datasets, clear visibility across pipelines, and reliable integration with BigQuery, Vertex AI, and Google Cloud Pub/Sub. Event-driven DAGs orchestrate ingestion, transformation, pre-aggregation, and AI model triggers—ensuring schools and districts receive real-time, actionable insights without compromising security or compliance. As Tim notes, “Now on Astro, we have really clear visibility into the whole of our orchestration pipeline. Our engineers can see exactly where something failed and resolve it much faster.”

“Astro is central to how we bring all the pieces together—from raw data ingestion to AI‑powered insights. Without it, we couldn’t deliver this level of speed, scale, or reliability to educators.” Tim Handley Chief Product & Technology Officer

How Astro Orchestrates AI in Edu Intelligence

High-level Edu Intelligence AI platform architecture

Astro sits at the heart of Edu Intelligence, pulling together every part of the data journey into a seamless, reliable flow. The process begins with data sources—student information systems, HR systems, surveys, and operational apps—all feeding into Google Cloud Storage through custom API connectors. When key events occur, such as a survey closing, Google Cloud Pub/Sub sends triggers directly to Astro, which launches the right Airflow DAGs at the right time.

From there, Astro orchestrates dbt Core models (run via Cosmos) to transform and normalize the raw data into BigQuery, creating per‑customer datasets with shared schema but strict isolation for security and regulatory purposes.

The data then flows into two engines: Vertex AI models generate pre‑built reports and suggested actions, as well as respond to user questions, while Cube Cloud provides a universal semantic layer that connects to embeddable dashboards and Edu Intelligence’s network of 19 specialized AI agents. Educators and administrators can ask natural language questions, visualize results, and immediately act on insights—all without worrying about the complexity behind the scenes.

Edu Intelligence’s agentic AI interface

In practice, Astro ensures every workflow runs only when needed, keeps costs under control, and provides clear observability from raw data ingestion to AI‑driven recommendations. It’s the glue that holds Edu Intelligence together, making complex orchestration invisible to the educators it empowers.

Accelerating Development with Astro IDE

Welbee’s team also adopted Astro IDE to speed up development and onboarding. Tim reports dramatic time savings and higher-quality outputs because the IDE is Airflow‑aware and interactive:

“With Astro IDE, I completed five or six hours of work in under an hour – exactly the kind of time savings data teams need. The code it generated was high-quality and production-ready from the start. Compared to generic AI tools, Astro IDE was miles ahead, with a deeper understanding of Airflow and the ability to ask the right questions. Even with our most complex DAGs, it was able to explain, transform, and adapt them with ease.” Tim Handley Chief Product & Technology Officer

Tim also highlighted that Astro IDE doesn’t just write code—it explains its work, making onboarding new developers far easier and accelerating their learning curve. In side-by-side tests, it outperformed generic AI tools by a wide margin, delivering results that actually worked and guiding the team through complex transformations. The combination of speed, accuracy, and explainability has made it an indispensable tool for Welbee’s developers.

The Results

The move to Astro has delivered tangible results for Welbee and its customers, strengthening both technical operations and real-world educational outcomes.

Faster Troubleshooting: Reduced troubleshooting time by 50% with full pipeline visibility, allowing engineers to identify and fix issues far more quickly. Tim explained, “Our engineers can now pinpoint failures immediately and resolve them in half the time it used to take.”

Greater Scale: Scaled orchestration to handle over 6M data transformations annually, supporting hundreds of daily survey workflows across schools. As Tim shared, “We’re orchestrating millions of transformations each year, and Astro gives us the reliability we need to keep up with that scale.”

Time Savings for Educators: Freed educators from manual data analysis, cutting their workload by 90% and giving them back days each term to focus on teaching and wellbeing initiatives. Tim noted, “Head teachers and principals aren’t data scientists. With Edu Intelligence, they can get answers in minutes instead of spending days in spreadsheets.”

Strong Data Security: Delivered secure, multi-tenant data pipelines that protect sensitive student information while enabling AI-driven insights at scale. In Tim’s words, “Security and privacy are non‑negotiable in education, and Astro helps us ensure sensitive student data stays protected while still delivering powerful insights.”

Actionable AI Insights: As Tim put it, “We never give our customers data without suggested actions. Astro helps us orchestrate the AI and models so schools don’t just get numbers—they get insights and strategies they can act on immediately.”

High Reliability: Astro has provided consistently reliable operations, with uptime and workflow success rates exceeding expectations and ensuring educators always have access to insights when they need them.

What’s Next

Welbee plans to expand ingestion to more varied data sources—such as HR and granular, question-level student assessment data (e.g., exam results, formative assessments, classroom-level performance data)—while continuing to optimize orchestration pipelines. With an open fundraising round and international growth, the company aims to scale its AI-driven insights to more schools worldwide, empowering educators to act quickly and effectively on the challenges that matter most, ultimately improving staff wellbeing and student outcomes.

“Our next focus is ingesting even more types of data so we can uncover deeper connections and provide even stronger recommendations to educators. Astro will be critical in orchestrating those new workflows and keeping everything reliable at scale.” Tim Handley Chief Product & Technology Officer