Orkes – a company with a platform that offers the fastest way to scale distributed systems – announced it has raised $20 million in new funding. Nexus Venture Partners led this latest funding round with participation from existing investors Battery Ventures and Vertex Ventures US. And Nexus Managing Director Abhishek Sharma led his firm’s investment and will be joining the board.
The company experienced significant growth since its initial launch and a $9.3 million raise in 2022, including revealing industry-first AI tools and winning large multinational customers like United Wholesale Mortgage, Foxtel, and startups like Collective.
Thousands of organizations and Fortune 100 companies depend on the open-source Conductor project actively maintained by Orkes, including Atlassian, Tesla, Oracle, American Express, GE Healthcare, and government agencies like the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Justice.
Orkes will utilize the funding round to build out its offerings, such as its new AI orchestration platform, that make it easy for businesses to weave complex generative AI-powered workflows into existing and new applications and continue to grow the Conductor open-source platform and community.
Businesses across industries – including banking and insurance, entertainment and media, healthcare, etc. – use Orkes Conductor due to its tailored offerings for sensitive use cases, deployment and configuration flexibility, and enterprise-grade security posture. And developers love the platform because it allows them to focus on building business logic and architecting complex applications that are easy to manage and troubleshoot while achieving the resilience and scalability that comes from its battle-tested open-source roots. Some of the use cases for Orkes Conductor include:
Foxtel – a leading broadcast and streaming company that is majority-owned by News Corp. – is using Orkes Conductor to transform the development of its distributed digital processes to ensure new applications are agile, cost-efficient, reliable, and scalable.
Collective (the San Francisco-based back-office platform designed for Businesses-of-One) uses Orkes to transform its tech stack from largely manual processes to streamlined and automated workflows, and to launch into new markets faster than ever before. And one of the largest healthcare organizations in the world is using Orkes Conductor for orchestration of machine learning pipelines. They chose Orkes over competitive offerings because of its ability to create complex distributed applications easily and run them at scale. One of the largest insurance companies in the Asia Pacific region utilizes Orkes Conductor to modernize its client-facing claims management processes.
Orkes co-CTO Viren Baraiya created the Conductor open-source microservices and workflow orchestration engine along with co-CTO Boney Sekh and CEO Jeu George while at Netflix for scaling the hyper growth and resulting complexity of its code base. In 2021, the group teamed up with former Microsoft and Amazon product leader Dilip Lukose to find Orkes as an enterprise-grade managed service for engineering teams looking to build their applications on Conductor.
Netflix has since stepped back from maintenance of the open-source Conductor project, and Orkes now owns the project with a new fork that they maintain and govern in close collaboration with the community.
KEY QUOTES:
“Orkes Conductor is more important than ever as businesses build applications that require fine-grained workflows, rely on numerous disparate services and APIs, and must now leverage AI for increased productivity and efficiency. Revenue has tripled in the past year, with even faster logo growth; our average deal size is in the six figures. Our customers are investing heavily in Orkes across AWS, GCP and Azure deployments as we enable them to have their data and compute residing on their cloud footprint or fully hosted by Orkes on the cloud of their choice.”
– Jeu George, CEO and co-founder of Orkes
United Wholesale Mortgage (UWM), the largest mortgage lender in the U.S., uses Orkes Conductor to rapidly build complex applications with both code and a visual UI. “Thanks to Orkes Cloud, we barely have to think about orchestration or managing our complex workflows. Our DevOps Architects don’t have to spend 95% of their time managing Conductor; they can focus on creating new services and features.”
– Andy French, UWM’s AVP of Platform Automation
“Orkes has been instrumental in increasing developer agility, creating cost efficiencies, and building highly reliable and secure applications.”
– Foxtel Lead Architect Thisara Alawala
