Temporal, the leading state management systems company, today announced it raised $103 million in Series B funding. Index Venture Capital led the round and was joined by Sequoia Capital, Amplify Partners, Madrona Venture Group and Addition Ventures. Temporal raised more than $120 million since its founding in 2019, and Series B funds will be used to expand the team with a heavy focus on developer empowerment, growing the vibrant open source community, and developing new features for Temporal’s cloud offering.

Temporal was founded by Maxim Fateev and Samar Abbas, the leading experts in application state management. Fateev and Abbas led the design and development of Simple Workflow at AWS, which was the first technology to solve the state management problem. Over the last decade, they architected business critical systems including Durable Task Framework and Uber Cadence before arriving at the ideal solution: Temporal – an MIT licensed platform for unifying and managing application state.

“The challenges Samar and I saw at Amazon 15 years ago are the same challenges in front of almost every company today,” said Maxim Fateev, Temporal co-founder and CEO. “The average business application now lives across dozens of stateful servers and services, which has been great for flexibility and scale, but it’s also made applications increasingly brittle and difficult to troubleshoot or enhance.”

“The cloud permanently changed software development,” said Mike Volpi, partner and co-founder of Index Venture Capital’s San Francisco office. “The benefits are tremendous but the cost of cloud application complexity is not sustainable. For more than a year, our conversations with Temporal users have revealed their extraordinary enthusiasm for Temporal’s solution. The exponential growth of the community is a testament to Maxim and Samar’s unique vision. Temporal has all the right ingredients and we’re honored to partner with the company on its journey to become one of the industry’s enduring software companies.”

To further illustrate these challenges, containerization and service based architectures require engineers to manage state, a time consuming and error prone process which shifts the software development focus from business logic to brittle plumbing. Developers have historically relied on database transactions to maintain application consistency, but this is not an option for scalable cloud applications. So they’re forced to crudely assemble infrastructure like queues, databases, CRON jobs and more in order to reach some semblance of a cohesive application experience. Temporal provides a consistent and unified backend for stateful applications that empowers developers to use the languages, tool stacks, and deployment environment of their choice.

Temporal’s underlying technology was built by its co-founders at Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, and is used to solve state management at big cloud and leading tech companies today including: Netflix, Doordash, Snap, Box, Stripe, Hashicorp, Coinbase and many more. Examples include:

  • AWS, Azure and Google Cloud: Temporal’s co-founders led teams at AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, to address the challenge of writing and running modern stateful applications.
  • Netflix: chose Temporal as the foundation for its next-gen CI/CD system which will be used by almost every Netflix developer. “We’ve been using Temporal as a critical and core component in developing our next-gen CI/CD platform at Netflix, where it’s being used to help orchestrate fast, safe, and reliable software delivery to multiple cloud providers’ data centers around the world,” said Rob Zienert, Netflix senior software engineer. “Netflix engineers spend less time writing logic to maintain application consistency or guard against failures because Temporal does it for them. The Temporal platform is easy to operate and fits naturally in our development workflow.”
  • Descript: relies on Temporal to eliminate production incidents. “Descript had one incident every week just on the transcription workflow because it was too complicated to maintain,” said Nicolas Gere-lamaysouette, software engineer at Descript. “Engineers can test each worker separately, but it was impossible to test the logic for every new feature end-to-end, so they were afraid of doing any changes in that code path. The frequency of production incidents has declined from once-a-week to virtually zero.”
  • Instacart: seamlessly migrated multiple core systems to Temporal and now runs over 75 million monthly workflows. “The Temporal technology has been core to many new Instacart offerings, growing rapidly and without drama to over 75 million monthly workflows across vastly different use cases within only a few months after production launch,” said Josh Wickham, Instacart engineering manager, systems and frameworks. “Temporal the company and community have been key to that success, providing Instacart with clear, timely assistance and guidance for how to use the product at such a large scale.”
  • Datadog: leverages Temporal for database reliability and developer experience, boasting over 100 internal Temporal users.
  • Snap: is a vocal early adopter of Temporal, embracing it as a cross-organization solution for services orchestration and infrastructure deployments. “Temporal Cloud provides Snap a highly reliable and scalable foundation for Snap Stories, enabling us to deliver the amazing global experience our users have come to expect,” said Saral Jain, Director Of Engineering, Enterprise and Cloud Services at Snap Inc.