Seattle-based Temporal, a leading microservices orchestration platform provider, has raised a significant growth round of $146 million to accelerate its expansion into the AI era. The funding, led by Tiger Global, brings the company's total valuation to $1.72 billion post-money, a slight increase from its previous valuation of $1.5 billion.

The investment will be channeled into research and development, sales, and marketing efforts. Temporal plans to build on its recent feature launch, Nexus, which enhances security, fault isolation, and modularity in its Temporal Cloud platform. The company also aims to make its platform available on Azure, enabling more cross-cloud work and exploring AI use cases.

Temporal's microservices orchestration platform has been in use since 2019, helping customers manage functions and actions that bring together data from numerous, disparate apps. However, with the rise of AI, the company sees an opportunity to expand its platform to support newer areas like agentic AI, which combines language models to work with and across data from multiple services.

The company's client list, which includes notable names like Box, Instacart, Snap, Stripe, and Nvidia, demonstrates its growing presence in the AI space. Nvidia, in particular, is a significant partner, having announced a microservices software platform called NIM to streamline the deployment of AI models in production environments.

Temporal's growth, although slower than in the past, remains impressive. The company reported a 4.4x revenue increase over the past 18 months, with its Temporal.io open source platform now boasting 183,000 active users and its enterprise managed service Temporal Cloud claiming 2,500 customers.

The company's founders, Samar Abbas and Maxim Fateev, who previously worked together at Uber, saw an opportunity to create a platform that could manage microservices beyond Uber's own needs. Today, Temporal is poised to capitalize on the growing demand for microservices that support AI applications.

Abbas, who took over as CEO in April last year, outlined the company's plans to grow its headcount from 250 to over 300 employees in the coming months and expand its presence in EMEA and Asia-Pacific & Japan. With this growth funding, Temporal is well-positioned to solidify its leadership in the microservices space and capitalize on the opportunities presented by the AI boom.

The microservices market is becoming increasingly competitive, with startups like Restate and Orkes entering the field. However, Temporal's early mover advantage, combined with its AI-focused expansion, sets it up for continued success in the years to come.

As the AI era continues to shape the technology landscape, Temporal's growth funding and strategic expansion plans demonstrate the company's commitment to staying at the forefront of innovation. With its sights set on supporting the next generation of AI applications, Temporal is poised to play a critical role in shaping the future of microservices and cloud computing.