Temporal raises $300 million at $5 billion valuation as AI agents demand reliable infrastructure

Temporal raises $300 million in Andreessen-led round amid AI agent boom

Feb 17 (Reuters) - Software startup Temporal has raised $300 million in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, valuing the company at $5 billion, as demand rises for infrastructure to support artificial intelligence systems, the company told Reuters. The valuation doubles the $2.5 billion that the company reached after a secondary financing round in October led by GIC, Singapore's sovereign wealth fund. Lightspeed Venture Partners and Sapphire Ventures joined the Series D round, along with existing investors including Sequoia Capital, Temporal said. Founded in 2019, Temporal builds open-source software and a cloud service designed to ensure "durable execution" of code - allowing applications to resume where they left off after failures without requiring engineers to write custom recovery logic. Co-founder and Chief Executive Samar Abbas said that capability is becoming more critical as AI systems move from generating responses to carrying out real-world tasks. "We've been building Temporal for over a decade now and what we are trying to solve is these core reliability problems for distributed systems," Abbas said in an interview. "When the software moves from generating answers to executing work, the tolerance of failure basically becomes tiny." Abbas said the funding was not about "chasing an AI moment," but about building a platform made to address reliability challenges in complex, long-running processes common for AI agents. The company offers its open-source software for free and monetizes through Temporal Cloud, a multi-tenant managed service that charges customers based on usage. Temporal counts AI firms like OpenAI among its customers, as well as companies in other industries, including Snap (SNAP.N), opens new tab , Netflix (NFLX.O), opens new tab and JPMorgan Chase (JPM.N), opens new tab . The San Francisco-based company, which employs more than 380 people, plans to use the funds for research and product development, as well as to expand its sales and marketing efforts. "Reliability is not like an optimization, it's actually a gating factor for these systems to work," said Sarah Wang, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz who led the investment. "Temporal is essentially the execution layer for all of that, so we believe this is the perfect gen AI infrastructure bet." Reporting by Krystal Hu in San Francisco; Editing by Kevin Buckland Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab * Suggested Topics: * Media & Telecom Krystal Hu Thomson Reuters Krystal reports on venture capital and startups for Reuters. She covers Silicon Valley and beyond through the lens of money and characters, with a focus on growth-stage startups, tech investments and AI. She has previously covered M&A for Reuters, breaking stories on Trump's SPAC and Elon Musk's Twitter financing. Previously, she reported on Amazon for Yahoo Finance, and her investigation of the company's retail practice was cited by lawmakers in Congress. Krystal started a career in journalism by writing about tech and politics in China. She has a master's degree from New York University, and enjoys a scoop of Matcha ice cream as much as getting a scoop at work.

Temporal raises $300M, hits $5B valuation as Seattle-area infrastructure startup rides AI wave

Temporal has raised $300 million in a Series D funding round at a $5 billion valuation, positioning the company as a key infrastructure provider for the emerging wave of AI agents moving into real-world production. The latest round, led by Andreessen Horowitz, doubles the company's valuation from October. Temporal builds open-source software and a cloud service that helps companies run long-running, complex workflows reliably -- what it calls "durable execution." The Bellevue, Wash.-based company says that as AI systems become more autonomous and take actions across multiple services, reliability has become a challenge. "Agentic AI doesn't fail because the models aren't good enough," Samar Abbas, CEO and co-founder of Temporal, said in a press release. "It fails because the systems around them can't handle real-world execution." Temporal says revenue grew more than 380% year-over-year, weekly active usage increased 350%, and installations rose 500%. Its cloud platform has processed 9.1 trillion lifetime action executions, including 1.86 trillion for AI-native companies. OpenAI uses Temporal to help power certain production workflows. Other customers include ADP, Yum! Brands, and Block. Andreessen Horowitz described Temporal as becoming a foundational execution layer for the AI era. "For long-running agents operating over extended horizons, the durability that Temporal provides is the difference between a compelling demo and a production system," the Silicon Valley firm wrote in a blog post. "The underlying execution layer has become a central piece of the emerging AI agent stack." Temporal originally focused on helping developers manage complex, distributed workflows. But the rise of AI agents has amplified the need for infrastructure that can safely execute long-running, stateful systems over extended periods. Temporal's platform preserves application state, automatically retries failed steps, and allows workflows to resume exactly where they left off instead of starting over. Temporal co-founders Samar Abbas and Maxim Fateev previously worked together at Uber and helped build an internal open-source orchestration engine called Cadence. The experience helped inspire them to launch Temporal in 2019. Fateev previously worked at Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. Abbas also worked at Microsoft and Amazon. Abbas took over CEO duties from Fateev in 2024. Fateev is now CTO. Temporal has raised $650 million to date. It closed a $105 million secondary transaction in October, and raised $146 million Series C round earlier in 2025. The company employs 375 people. Temporal also announced Tuesday that Raghu Raghuram, former VMware CEO and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, is joining the company as a board observer. Other backers in the latest round include Lightspeed Venture Partners and Sapphire Ventures, along with existing investors including Sequoia Capital, Index, Tiger, GIC, Madrona, and Amplify.