Temporal Raises $550M at a $12.55B Valuation as Demand Grows for Reliable AI Infrastructure

Temporal, which develops and distributes the world's leading open-source durable execution system, led by Samar Abbas and Maxim Fateev, has raised a $550M Series E at a $12.55B valuation, co-led by Lightspeed, with Wellington Management, Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives, and Tiger Global, with strong participation from T. Rowe Price and SV Angel. Returning investors include a16z, Sequoia, Index, GIC, Sapphire Ventures, and Amplify.

The Challenge of Building Reliable AI Systems.

AI is raising customer expectations while making the systems underneath applications more complex and fragile. Engineering organizations across the spectrum are facing the same pressure, whether building new AI-native products or operating decades-old enterprise systems.

As AI moves deeper into the technology stack, agents are increasingly interacting with critical infrastructure, including systems that move money and manage core business processes. A working agent can now be built in hours, but the competitive advantage comes from making it reliable enough to earn long-term customer trust.

Temporal addresses both challenges through Durable Execution. Developers write standard application code while Temporal orchestrates work across systems, preserving state and automatically recovering from failures. Applications can pause for days awaiting approval or resume after an outage without requiring developers to build recovery logic from scratch.

A Decade of Building Reliable Distributed Systems.

Temporal co-founders Samar Abbas and Maxim Fateev have worked on distributed systems infrastructure since before the current AI boom. At Amazon, Fateev led messaging infrastructure that helped lay the groundwork for SQS before leading Simple Workflow Service (SWF). Abbas later joined the team that launched SWF publicly in 2012. At Microsoft, Abbas co-created the open-source Durable Task Framework, which later became the foundation for Azure Durable Functions.

The two reunited at Uber to build Cadence, which grew to more than 100 internal use cases within three years before becoming open source in 2017. Abbas and Fateev left Uber in 2019 to build Temporal as an independent, open-source platform.

The rise of AI has intensified the underlying challenge: building reliable systems that can coordinate complex, long-running workflows across increasingly distributed infrastructure.

Strong Growth Across the Platform.

Temporal’s annualized revenue run rate has grown more than 200% year over year, while net dollar retention has remained above 200% since February. In August, the platform processed 1.9 trillion billable actions, up more than 350% year over year, while open-source installs surpassed 43 million, a 134% increase since December 2025.

The customer base has also expanded to more than 4,300 paying customers, up 139% year over year, including OpenAI, Snap, NVIDIA, and JPMorgan Chase. Snap processes 414 million Stories a day through Temporal, while JPMorgan Chase runs the platform in regulated production. OpenAI’s use of Temporal has increased 60-fold in less than a year.

Experiences like Venkat Venkataramani's, OpenAI's VP of Infrastructure, put it in perspective:

"As infrastructure teams increasingly handle really complex, long-running workflows, they have even less control over external dependencies. Durable Execution is more than ever a core requirement for modern AI systems, and Temporal offers a compelling platform to help build it in from the start. This is one of the main reasons why we invested in building a durable orchestration framework powered by Temporal at OpenAI."

"Reliability has never been optional, but AI has quickly raised the cost of skipping it, and developers need a foundation for that built in from day one, not bolted on afterward. This round is a bet that far more of the world's most demanding software is going to be built on it." - Samar Abbas, CEO.

What Comes Next.

The new funding will support Temporal’s global expansion, building on a team that has doubled to 570 employees over the past year. Investment will focus on the platform’s core infrastructure, alongside continued work on reliability and security for enterprise customers.

The strategy reflects growing demand for reliable infrastructure as AI and distributed systems become more deeply embedded in enterprise software. Temporal’s expanding production usage provides the foundation for the next phase of growth.

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