Temporal lands $146 million at a flat valuation, eyes agentic AI expansion

Summary

Seattle-based Temporal has made its name over the last several years in the world of microservices — specifically providing a platform to orchestrate the messy business of building and operating integrations and updates across disparate services and apps in the cloud. But the AI boom has come at the company fast. Now, Temporal has raised a growth round of $146 million to build what it believes the next chapter will be in its space: AI, and specifically building microservices to support newer areas like agentic AI. A chunk of the investment will be going into R&D. At the end of 2024, the company launched a new feature called Nexus in its Temporal Cloud platform to improve security, fault isolation and modularity, and it says it’s going to continue developing that, alongside public cloud availability for Azure, enabling more cross-cloud work, and “R&D for AI use cases.” Temporal will also be using some of the funds to invest in sales and marketing. Tiger Global is leading the round, with participation from previous backers that include Index Ventures (who led the Series B) and Sequoia Capital (who led the Series A ). With this Series C, Temporal has now raised $350 million. The round is sizeable, but the devil is in the details. TechCrunch understands that the company’s valuation with this round is $1.72 billion post-money — “a little bit up — a very little bit,” in the words of CEO and co-founder Samar Abbas said. The company’s previous funding — a $75 million Series B extension announced February 2023 — was made at a flat valuation of $1.5 billion. And ahead of that, there was a report in Prime Unicorn Index that the valuation had dipped as low as $880 million, a figure the company has not confirmed. Abbas and his co-founder Maxim Fateev (CTO) started Temporal after the pair worked together at Uber, where they jointly developed Cadence, Uber’s open source orchestration engine designed to route requests and mediate interactions between different microservices. Knowin...