It is a bit unpolished and still a work in progress, but has some features that are useful for data science workflows that most software build tools do not cover:
* Steps can produce multiple named outputs (for example full.csv and summary.csv), dependency graph can branch in both ways,
* Outputs that are directories with many files,
* Built-in input/output file sharding (for example by date or month) and HDFS support,
* Lots of control over which steps to execute: not just "rebuild target X and any required upstream dependencies". Can select a target and all that depend on it downstream (if you know that a remote file changed), skip rebuilding some steps, etc,
* Can put very short (text processing) scripts directly in the Drakefile in Python, Ruby.