Last Updated: 14 September 2026
Temporal, an open source software company founded by Samar Abbas and Maxim Fateev, has raised new funding as demand grows for infrastructure that can keep AI applications running reliably. The company develops technology that helps software processes continue even when individual services, networks, or machines fail. Reliability is the central problem here.
The issue is becoming more important as companies move AI agents from demonstrations into real business operations. A 2026 IBM Research study on production AI agents, based on 20 case studies and a survey of 306 practitioners across 26 domains, found that reliability, meaning consistent correct behavior over time, was the top development challenge for production AI agents. Production systems have little room for failure.
Temporal has now raised $550 million in a Series E round at a $12.55 billion valuation. Lightspeed led the financing, while Wellington Management, Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives, and Tiger Global served as co leads. T. Rowe Price and SV Angel also participated, and returning investors included a16z, Sequoia, Index Ventures, GIC, Sapphire Ventures, and Amplify. The round brings in several major institutional investors.
AI agents can carry out sequences of actions across several software tools instead of producing only a single response. This creates more points where a process can stop, especially when one service becomes unavailable or a network connection fails during a longer task. Each extra step adds another dependency.
Temporal addresses this through a technology it calls Durable Execution. The system preserves the state of an application, allowing a process to continue after an interruption instead of beginning again from the start. Developers can use this approach for tasks that may run for long periods or depend on several connected systems.
The company says its business has expanded quickly during 2026. Temporal's annualized revenue run rate recently passed $250 million, an increase of more than 200% year over year, while net dollar retention has remained above 200% since February. Paying customers now exceed 4,300 and include OpenAI, Snap, NVIDIA, Netflix, and JPMorgan Chase. Customer usage has also increased sharply.
Temporal Cloud processed more than 1.9 trillion actions in August, up more than 350% from the previous year. Open source installs passed 43 million during the same month, representing a 134% increase since January 2026. Those figures show how widely the software is being used.
“Every team building on AI hits the same wall: the demo is easy, production is hard, because the systems around the models can't handle real-world execution. Most of the market solves that by locking teams into a proprietary stack. Temporal is the open, pluggable foundation that runs their agents and the systems they already depend on, and it's becoming one of the most important pieces of infrastructure in the agentic era.”
Anoushka Vaswani, Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners
Temporal plans to use the new capital to expand its global operations and invest further in platform research and development. It also intends to grow its developer and enterprise go to market efforts while adding the teams and infrastructure needed for the next stage of the business. Hiring has already increased significantly.
The company's workforce has doubled during the past year and now stands at 570 employees. The Series E also adds more long term institutional capital through firms including Wellington Management, Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives, and T. Rowe Price. The funding will support continued expansion.
Temporal was founded in 2019 by Samar Abbas and Maxim Fateev, who had previously worked together on distributed systems at Uber. The pair also co created Cadence, an open source workflow engine that helped provide the foundation for Temporal. Abbas is now the company's CEO, while Fateev serves as CTO. Their work focuses on reliable software execution.
In practical terms, Temporal helps an application remember where it was when something goes wrong. Its Durable Execution technology records application state so a process can continue after events such as a crash, network outage, or unavailable service instead of having to restart. Developers can operate the open source version themselves or use Temporal Cloud, the company's managed service.
“As agents take on more critical work across more systems, every additional step creates another place to fail. In production, that work has to survive those failures and finish reliably. Temporal was built for this problem. Durable Execution is becoming the standard for reliable applications at scale, and this investment reflects the conviction that much of the next generation of software will be built on Temporal.”
Samar Abbas, co founder and CEO of Temporal Technologies
The platform can work with different programming languages, AI models, software tools, and infrastructure. Temporal says its technology supports applications at companies including Anysphere, the company behind Cursor, Lovable, NVIDIA, Scale AI, Salesforce, Shopify, Netflix, Booking.com, JPMorgan Chase, Block, and DoorDash. Its customer base spans several types of software workloads.
Lightspeed led the latest round after already investing in Temporal's Series D earlier in 2026. The venture capital firm has invested in technology companies for more than 20 years and backs businesses from seed stage through Series F and beyond. Its portfolio includes companies such as Anthropic, ElevenLabs, and Fireworks AI. Lightspeed operates across the United States, Europe, Israel, India, and Southeast Asia.
The new financing continues a period of rapid fundraising for Temporal. In February 2026, the company raised a $300 million Series D at a $5 billion valuation, led by Andreessen Horowitz. Lightspeed and Sapphire Ventures also participated in that round. In March 2025, Temporal raised a $146 million Series C led by Tiger Global at a $1.72 billion post money valuation.
After the Series C brought Temporal's total funding to $350 million, the Series D and Series E increased that figure to $1.2 billion. The latest investor group also includes Wellington Management, Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives, Tiger Global, T. Rowe Price, SV Angel, a16z, Sequoia, Index, GIC, Sapphire Ventures, and Amplify.
