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

By Krystal Hu

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, Netflix NFLX.O and JPMorgan Chase JPM.N.

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)