Temporal raises $75M to ease the development of stateful, cloud-native apps

CLOUD

Software execution system startup Temporal Technologies Inc. said today it has closed on a $75 million round of funding that will be used to help grow the community around its cloud service.

The funding, which comes just over a year after the company raised $103 million in a Series B round, was led by Greenoaks, with participation from existing investors Amplify Partners, Index Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Madrona and Addition Ventures.

Temporal is the creator of a durable execution system that software engineering teams can use to take full advantage of distributed, cloud-native technologies such as software containers. It enables developers to build and deploy reliable and consistent applications to their users.

The problem Temporal tackles is that cloud-native applications are inherently “stateless,” meaning that they cannot remember any changes that have been made once they shut down. To make these apps more useful, they must become “stateful,” which means providing them with an underlying, persistent storage layer, such as a database management system.

For developers, the task of instilling state in stateless apps is a major headache, and they’re often forced to bolt together complex infrastructure such as databases, queues and schedulers. It takes up a lot of time, and the resulting infrastructure is often fragile, resulting in regular errors occurring.

Temporal says its cloud-based service abstracts away this complexity. It offers a database under the hood, with the key benefit being that users aren’t exposed to it. Rather, they just interact with it by writing and running code.

Temporal then takes care of the distributed application challenges automatically. It offers a software development kit that supports programming languages including Java, Javascript, Go and PhP, enabling developers to carry out tasks such as managing signals, workflows and timers.

“Temporal simplifies the development process by shifting complex, error-checking code, retry processes and state management to a central platform, so developers don’t have to manage these complexities,” said Temporal co-founder and Chief Executive Maxim Fateev.

The company’s main offering is open source, but it offers a paid version that provides greater automation and frees up developers to focus their time on adding new features to their apps.

“At Netflix, we view Temporal as a fundamental shift in the way applications can be developed, and it is rare to see a new programming model like this come along,” said Rob Zeinert, senior software engineer at Netflix Inc.. “Temporal has solved a huge challenge for developers with a platform that orchestrates and manages software failures that otherwise would bring down distributed applications.”

Netflix is just one of thousands of Temporal users. The company says it saw more than 50,000 new developers join its user community in 2022, with big companies including Netflix Inc., Datadog Inc., Snap Inc., Comcast Corp. and Australia and New Zealand Banking Group Ltd. all signing on or expanding their use of its platform. Over the last year, it added almost 300 new customers, it said.

Amplify Partner Lenny Pruss said that Temporal is one of his organization’s most interesting investments because it has the potential to make an impact on multiple markets and fundamentally alter the way companies approach application and service delivery. There’s a bright future in store for the company, he believes. “The momentum that is building around the technology is palpable as we hear it from not just our portfolio of companies but from leading engineering organizations that are redefining what it means to be a software-led, cloud-first development organization,” he said.

Image: Temporal