Microservices Orchestration Platform Temporal Closes $18.75 Million

By Annie Baker • Oct 20, 2020
  • Temporal — a maker of an open-source, stateful, microservices orchestration platform — announced it has raised $18.75 million in Series A funding

Temporal — a maker of an open-source, stateful, microservices orchestration platform — announced it has raised $18.75 million in Series A funding. Sequoia Capital led the round and was joined by Madrona Venture Group along with existing investors Addition Ventures and Amplify Partners. Including this funding round, the company has raised a total of $25.5 million.

This round of funding will be used to grow the existing open source community and develop a Temporal cloud offering. And users include Snap, Box, Coinbase, and Checkr — who have realized increased developer productivity and application reliability after adopting Temporal.

Temporal was founded by CEO Maxim Fateev and CTO Samar Abbas — who created and led the open-source Cadence project at Uber. And the success of Cadence led to widespread internal and external adoption — which prompted Maxim and Samar to start a new company in order to productize the future of microservices orchestration.

Microservices are providing teams with scalability and flexibility, but they come at the cost of productivity for developers and reliability for applications. And many business processes today span multiple microservices, and currently there is no orchestration solution that provides end-to-end visibility into the state of processes while ensuring errors are handled reliably and consistently.

Temporal offers a code-first open-source runtime — which companies are using in multiple production scenarios to orchestrate microservices, provision resources, build data pipelines, and other tasks. And code written with Temporal is executed directly, enabling developers to use the development, debugging, and testing processes they already know and love.

Snap utilizes Temporal to provide visibility and reliability into long-running critical processes. Instead of spending time debugging failures, Snap engineers are able get instant feedback about the state of business processes. And since adopting Temporal, developers at Snap focus on writing impactful code instead of spending time tediously maintaining what they already built.

Box was one of the first adopters of Temporal and has since aggressively embraced the technology. And any time a file or folder is created, copied, modified, or shared, Temporal is involved behind the scenes to ensure the reliability of the operation. As a result, Temporal empowered Box developers to spend time writing the code that matters, instead of re-implementing reliability over and over again.

KEY QUOTES:

“Microservice architectures enable businesses to scale their software to meet consumer demand. Unfortunately, microservice architectures introduce significant overhead for developers and reliability problems for applications. Temporal empowers developers to write and operate highly reliable applications on top of scalable microservice architectures, without sacrificing productivity.”

— Maxim Fateev, Temporal co-founder and CEO

“Temporal is one of the most promising software companies. They have abstracted away an entire class of problems that currently costs developers time and companies money.”

— Entrepreneur and former Snowflake CEO Bob Muglia

“Today, developers spend too many hours writing and debugging custom code to mitigate potential failures across microservices. Temporal provides resiliency out of the box, enabling developers to build scalable applications and making it an essential component of any microservice architecture.”

— Bogomil Balkansky, partner at Sequoia

“Temporal enables Snapchat to focus on building the business logic of a robust asynchronous API system without requiring a complex state management infrastructure. This has improved the efficiency of launching our services for the Snapchat community.”

— Steven Sun, Tech Lead, Staff Software Engineer, Snap

“The idea of writing workflows as code was one of the main things that drew me to Temporal. It’s a lot easier for our developers to use it. It’s the way that it should be. Trying to define workflows as JSON is gnarly—writing workflows as code just makes sense.”

— Steven Cipolla, Senior Staff Software Engineer, Box