Temporal raises $103M to accelerate development of stateful cloud applications

Temporal Technologies Inc. today announced a $103 million Series B funding round at a valuation of more than $1.5 billion, saying usage of its state management software is growing roughly 25% per month.

The company has refined the description of its business since it announced an $18.75 million Series A round in late 2020. At the time, it described its software as a microservices orchestration platform. It now calls itself a state management systems company, reflecting the rapid growth of software containers and cloud-native applications.

“We’re an open-source way to write and run cloud applications so that they become reliable to run and easy to develop,” said Chief Product Officer Charles Zediewski.

Applications written to cloud-native constructs have the advantage of being almost infinitely scalable and flexible since new services can be added quickly with just a few lines of code. However, microservices and containers are inherently stateless, which means any changes are lost once the service shuts down. Stateful applications require an underlying persistent storage layer such as a database management system.

The task of instilling state in stateless applications “requires adding a bunch of rules or logic to check for state and find one or more pieces of infrastructure to save that state,” Zediewski said. Developers are forced to put together infrastructure like queues, databases and schedulers, with the results often being fragile and crash-prone.

Hiding complexity

Temporal uses a database under the covers, “but you aren’t exposed to that as a user,” Zediewski said.  “You interact just by writing and running code and we take care of the distributed application challenges without your having to worry about the underlying infrastructure.” The company’s software development kit currently supports Java, Go, PhP and Javascript, providing a set of building blocks for tasks such as managing workflows, signals and timers.

Head of Product Ryland Goldstein likened state management to the memory management tasks that vexed developers in the days of the C programming language. In the same way that Java introduced the concept of classes so developers didn’t have to manage memory, Temporal is trying to take infrastructure considerations out of software development.

The new cash infusion brings Temporal’s total funding to more than $128 million. The money will be used primarily to “reinvest in the community,” Zediewski said. That includes more research and development of the open-source platform, additional language support, educational resources and expansion of the developer advocate network.

Word-of-mouth marketing

The company’s sales strategy is centered on its open-source distribution, which executives believe creates developer affinity that leads to sales of its cloud service. Temporal doesn’t sell proprietary software but offers its server as a distributed service.

“You can run it yourself, but as a cloud service we run it for you and abstract away all the complexity of running the server,” Zediewski said. “It’s a namespace in your cloud service. You don’t need to know what version you’re on or the size of the instance.”

Although most companies invest at least a portion of a big new funding round in their sales operations, Zediweski said word-of-mouth marketing is doing the job is fine. “We plan to grow by investing in users and knocking on doors,” he said.

Index Ventures SA led the round and was joined by Sequoia Capital Operations LLC, Madrona Venture Group LLC and existing investors Addition Ventures LLC and Amplify Partners.

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