5 ms·

Temporal raises $550M at a $12.55B valuation

79 points by gk1 13d ago

dzonga 13d ago
in the age of agents, surely durable execution is a must. but the money being raised - what is it for ? go to market ? sponsorship & I like that temporal sponsored Crystal Palace. we've so many good durable execution engines. this is the type of VC pollution that will cause companies to end up being acquired by an Italian silverware company (bending spoons).
- amelius 13d ago
  > but the money being raised - what is it for ? Buying DRAM?
  - t2r3121 13d ago
    Temporal doesn't run your AI compute for you, you bring your own hardware on prem or in your cloud account or whereever. Their SaaS is a control plane to coordinate and orchestrate the workers.
    - amelius 12d ago
      Why not ask the AI to build the control pane for you?
      - t2r3121 12d ago
        Because the hard part of running it is making it highly available despite the inherent fallibility of distributed computing, which is an infrastructure problem, not an AI coding problem. Temporal is fully open source, you can run the entire thing on your laptop or your own server. People pay for the SaaS anyway, because dealing with the distributed computing problems is hard. (There are some other projects inspired by Temporal as well, but if you want to run something in-house, you're probably funding a minimum of 2-3 engineers to handle on-call, and for that price the SaaS is competitive).
- uncletaco 13d ago
  I’m in an interview loop with them. Hopefully that money is for building my wealth.
jakozaur 13d ago
[dead]
pksunkara 13d ago
Can someone tell me why people prefer temporal over something like https://restate.dev https://restate.dev?
- slaughtr 13d ago
  AI workflows are a convenient fit for temporal, their platform is great for much more than just those. It’s an elegant and easy to use solution for a lot of workflow needs.
  - sewen 13d ago
    That's fair, but they are also a great fit for Restate. For example, Replit migrated their whole coding agent from Temporal over to Restate, a pretty big setup.
- nosequel 13d ago
  Those two don't really compare. Temporal has been around 3 years longer and is a much more heavyweight system. Temporal can support workflows that sleep for months at a time and still reliably finish. I'm sure there is a place for restate.dev, but it isn't in the same place as Temporal.
  - stsffap 13d ago
    Disclaimer: I am a co-founder of Restate. Like Temporal, Restate supports workflows that sleep for months at a time and let's them reliably finish. It actually does many more useful things. For example, you can have services that remember state across invocations and there is no need for continue-as-new. Since Restate allows inlining durable steps into your workflow, it is very easy to co-locate your workflows with expensive resources such as sandboxes or other per-node resources. And the nice thing is that each durable step is really cheap and adds only minimal overhead.
- bpicolo 13d ago
  Restate is directly inspired by Temporal.
wxw 13d ago
> Our annualized revenue run rate is up more than 200% year over year, and net dollar retention's stayed above 200% since February. In August alone, the platform processed 1.9 trillion billable actions, up more than 350% year over year, while open source installs passed 43 million, up 134% since December 2025. We're now working with more than 4,300 paying customers, up 139% year over year, including OpenAI, Snap, NVIDIA, and JPMorgan Chase. Congrats to Temporal! They'd just previously raised in February, https://temporal.io/blog/temporal-raises-usd300m-series-d-at-a-usd5b-valuation https://temporal.io/blog/temporal-raises-usd300m-series-d-at...
- bix6 13d ago
  Any absolute rev numbers?
a_c 13d ago
Can someone shed some lights on what temporal does? Their blog says [1] Durable Execution offers three key benefits: It improves application reliability by providing fault tolerance. It simplifies code by allowing it to focus on the goal instead of potential problems. It accelerates development by eliminating the need to write complex error-handling logic. So... like exception handling? or something like erlang's let it crash mantra? Why is it such a big deal? Genuine question, not trying to be snarky [1] https://temporal.io/blog/what-is-durable-execution https://temporal.io/blog/what-is-durable-execution
- binlog 13d ago
  It’s an async job runner that scales well. Yeah they advertise a lot of fancy features, but really what they are selling is solid failure-resistant infra. Companies could set the same thing up with an in-house team, but it’s pretty great to be able to click a button and start running workloads at tens or hundreds of thousands of RPS without needing to figure out the internals.
  - a_c 13d ago
    Can I understand it as a performant celery with a UI?
    - datadrivenangel 13d ago
      With better ergonomics around handling failures.
    - binlog 13d ago
      Not the same thing, because celery and the like are sdk-level abstractions that need you to plug in your own queue (usually Redis, Kafka) and all other components. The Temporal server deployment includes the full control plane, queue, persistent database, UI and everything else. So you only need to manage your worker boxes.
      - kolanos 13d ago
fmajid 13d ago
That’s 1/3 what IBM paid for Red Hat, simply insane.
Syntaf 13d ago
Absolutely love temporal, but pretty shocked to see they have a $12.55B valuation.... feels nuts? We're using temporal as the foundation for agents running on our platform doing accounting work for clients, it's proven extremely effective and I love how durable workflows are within temporal. +100 on the technology, but realizing they are also VC funded makes me a little more cautious when it comes to vendor lock in.
ninininino 13d ago
Why isn't there more love for dbos.dev ?
- drdexebtjl 13d ago
  I think it’s nice that it’s just an SDK and a Postgres database, but they don’t have SDKs for the languages we use at work.
  - a_poliakov 13d ago
    Hey, out of curiosity: which languages are those?
    - drdexebtjl 13d ago
      Mostly C#, as I see your Rust SDK is under development. Unfortunately it appears someone vibe-coded a port of the Java SDK for .NET and namesquatted the `Dbos.Transact` package on NuGet [1], making it look like an official SDK. It's also not a very good port, mirroring the Java implementation instead of using idiomatic C#. If you ever plan on releasing a .NET library, I suggest opening up a dispute resolution [2] with the owner (it really is just an email to the guy, CCing NuGet support) and reserving the `Dbos` prefix [3]. [1]: https://www.nuget.org/packages/Dbos.Transact/0.0.0-alpha.0.47 https://www.nuget.org/packages/Dbos.Transact/0.0.0-alpha.0.4... [2]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/nuget/nuget-org/policies/dispute-resolution https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/nuget/nuget-org/policies/d... [3]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/nuget/nuget-org/id-prefix-reservation https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/nuget/nuget-org/id-prefix-...
  - ninininino 13d ago
    Porting and rewrites between languages is a task frontier models excel at
    - drdexebtjl 12d ago
      No. A huge selling point of these code-first workflow engines is that they make writing durable workflows a lot like writing non-durable code, to the maximum extent that the language allows, such that the workflow orchestration disappears. That is, they require good taste and opinionated API design first, porting skills second. The SDK for each language ends up being substantially different. Frontier models are not very good at this yet. I've tried. Ultimately I couldn't justify the effort when there are other workflow engines out there.
mococa 13d ago
Love to work with Temporal workflows
kgraves 12d ago
Have been using Temporal since 2025, congrats!

79 points by gk1 13d ago

in the age of agents, surely durable execution is a must. but the money being raised - what is it for ? go to market ? sponsorship & I like that temporal sponsored Crystal Palace. we've so many good durable execution engines. this is the type of VC pollution that will cause companies to end up being acquired by an Italian silverware company (bending spoons).

amelius 13d ago
> but the money being raised - what is it for ? Buying DRAM?
- t2r3121 13d ago
  Temporal doesn't run your AI compute for you, you bring your own hardware on prem or in your cloud account or whereever. Their SaaS is a control plane to coordinate and orchestrate the workers.
  - amelius 12d ago
    Why not ask the AI to build the control pane for you?
    - t2r3121 12d ago
      Because the hard part of running it is making it highly available despite the inherent fallibility of distributed computing, which is an infrastructure problem, not an AI coding problem. Temporal is fully open source, you can run the entire thing on your laptop or your own server. People pay for the SaaS anyway, because dealing with the distributed computing problems is hard. (There are some other projects inspired by Temporal as well, but if you want to run something in-house, you're probably funding a minimum of 2-3 engineers to handle on-call, and for that price the SaaS is competitive).
uncletaco 13d ago
I’m in an interview loop with them. Hopefully that money is for building my wealth.

jakozaur 13d ago

[dead]

pksunkara 13d ago

Can someone tell me why people prefer temporal over something like https://restate.dev https://restate.dev?

slaughtr 13d ago
AI workflows are a convenient fit for temporal, their platform is great for much more than just those. It’s an elegant and easy to use solution for a lot of workflow needs.
- sewen 13d ago
  That's fair, but they are also a great fit for Restate. For example, Replit migrated their whole coding agent from Temporal over to Restate, a pretty big setup.
nosequel 13d ago
Those two don't really compare. Temporal has been around 3 years longer and is a much more heavyweight system. Temporal can support workflows that sleep for months at a time and still reliably finish. I'm sure there is a place for restate.dev, but it isn't in the same place as Temporal.
- stsffap 13d ago
  Disclaimer: I am a co-founder of Restate. Like Temporal, Restate supports workflows that sleep for months at a time and let's them reliably finish. It actually does many more useful things. For example, you can have services that remember state across invocations and there is no need for continue-as-new. Since Restate allows inlining durable steps into your workflow, it is very easy to co-locate your workflows with expensive resources such as sandboxes or other per-node resources. And the nice thing is that each durable step is really cheap and adds only minimal overhead.
bpicolo 13d ago
Restate is directly inspired by Temporal.

wxw 13d ago

> Our annualized revenue run rate is up more than 200% year over year, and net dollar retention's stayed above 200% since February. In August alone, the platform processed 1.9 trillion billable actions, up more than 350% year over year, while open source installs passed 43 million, up 134% since December 2025. We're now working with more than 4,300 paying customers, up 139% year over year, including OpenAI, Snap, NVIDIA, and JPMorgan Chase. Congrats to Temporal! They'd just previously raised in February, https://temporal.io/blog/temporal-raises-usd300m-series-d-at-a-usd5b-valuation https://temporal.io/blog/temporal-raises-usd300m-series-d-at...

bix6 13d ago
Any absolute rev numbers?

a_c 13d ago

Can someone shed some lights on what temporal does? Their blog says [1] Durable Execution offers three key benefits: It improves application reliability by providing fault tolerance. It simplifies code by allowing it to focus on the goal instead of potential problems. It accelerates development by eliminating the need to write complex error-handling logic. So... like exception handling? or something like erlang's let it crash mantra? Why is it such a big deal? Genuine question, not trying to be snarky [1] https://temporal.io/blog/what-is-durable-execution https://temporal.io/blog/what-is-durable-execution

binlog 13d ago
It’s an async job runner that scales well. Yeah they advertise a lot of fancy features, but really what they are selling is solid failure-resistant infra. Companies could set the same thing up with an in-house team, but it’s pretty great to be able to click a button and start running workloads at tens or hundreds of thousands of RPS without needing to figure out the internals.
- a_c 13d ago
  Can I understand it as a performant celery with a UI?
  - datadrivenangel 13d ago
    With better ergonomics around handling failures.
  - binlog 13d ago
    Not the same thing, because celery and the like are sdk-level abstractions that need you to plug in your own queue (usually Redis, Kafka) and all other components. The Temporal server deployment includes the full control plane, queue, persistent database, UI and everything else. So you only need to manage your worker boxes.
    - kolanos 13d ago

fmajid 13d ago

That’s 1/3 what IBM paid for Red Hat, simply insane.

Syntaf 13d ago

Absolutely love temporal, but pretty shocked to see they have a $12.55B valuation.... feels nuts? We're using temporal as the foundation for agents running on our platform doing accounting work for clients, it's proven extremely effective and I love how durable workflows are within temporal. +100 on the technology, but realizing they are also VC funded makes me a little more cautious when it comes to vendor lock in.

ninininino 13d ago

Why isn't there more love for dbos.dev ?

drdexebtjl 13d ago
I think it’s nice that it’s just an SDK and a Postgres database, but they don’t have SDKs for the languages we use at work.
- a_poliakov 13d ago
  Hey, out of curiosity: which languages are those?
  - drdexebtjl 13d ago
    Mostly C#, as I see your Rust SDK is under development. Unfortunately it appears someone vibe-coded a port of the Java SDK for .NET and namesquatted the `Dbos.Transact` package on NuGet [1], making it look like an official SDK. It's also not a very good port, mirroring the Java implementation instead of using idiomatic C#. If you ever plan on releasing a .NET library, I suggest opening up a dispute resolution [2] with the owner (it really is just an email to the guy, CCing NuGet support) and reserving the `Dbos` prefix [3]. [1]: https://www.nuget.org/packages/Dbos.Transact/0.0.0-alpha.0.47 https://www.nuget.org/packages/Dbos.Transact/0.0.0-alpha.0.4... [2]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/nuget/nuget-org/policies/dispute-resolution https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/nuget/nuget-org/policies/d... [3]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/nuget/nuget-org/id-prefix-reservation https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/nuget/nuget-org/id-prefix-...
- ninininino 13d ago
  Porting and rewrites between languages is a task frontier models excel at
  - drdexebtjl 12d ago
    No. A huge selling point of these code-first workflow engines is that they make writing durable workflows a lot like writing non-durable code, to the maximum extent that the language allows, such that the workflow orchestration disappears. That is, they require good taste and opinionated API design first, porting skills second. The SDK for each language ends up being substantially different. Frontier models are not very good at this yet. I've tried. Ultimately I couldn't justify the effort when there are other workflow engines out there.

mococa 13d ago

Love to work with Temporal workflows

kgraves 12d ago

Have been using Temporal since 2025, congrats!