Microservices orchestration platform Temporal raises $75M and remains a unicorn

Temporal, an open source microservices orchestration platform used by companies, including Netflix, Snap and Comcast, has raised $75 million from a slew of high-profile investors including Sequoia Capital and Greenoaks.

The startup has also maintained its coveted unicorn status with a valuation of "just over" $1.5 billion, despite some reports to the contrary a few months back suggesting that its valuation had dipped below $900 million.

Founded in 2019, Temporal simplifies the development of distributed systems, which includes microservices, a software architecture built around integrations between smaller, function-specific components that are easier to maintain and scale compared to the monolithic software of yore. Such distributed systems rely on "queues" -- a type of asynchronous cross-service communication -- and databases to synchronize data across the board, which isn't always reliable and is difficult to manage at scale.

Durable

Temporal calls itself a "durable execution system" that allows companies to manage an application's state and monitor the execution of logic, all the while enabling them to push out software updates without disruption. Ultimately, it's all about helping developers and engineers spend time on building differentiated products rather than creating reliability code to ensure that their microservices don't break.