VC Firms Nexus, Battery and Vertex bet on Orkes’ thriving developer community and product roadmap as application orchestration becomes essential to modern software
Orkes, whose platform offers the fastest way to scale distributed systems, has raised $20 million in new funding. The company has experienced significant growth since its initial launch and $9.3 million raise in 2022, including revealing a suite of industry-first AI tools and winning large multinational customers such as United Wholesale Mortgage, Foxtel, and up-and-coming startups like Collective. Thousands of organizations and Fortune 100 companies rely on the open-source Conductor project actively maintained by Orkes, including Atlassian, Tesla, Oracle, American Express, GE Healthcare, and government agencies like the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Justice.
This latest round was led by Nexus Venture Partners with participation from existing investors Battery Ventures and Vertex Ventures US. Nexus Managing Director Abhishek Sharma led his firm’s investment and will be joining the board. Orkes will use the funding to build out its offerings, such as its new AI orchestration platform, that make it easy for businesses to weave complex generative AI-powered workflows into existing and new applications, and continue to grow the Conductor open-source platform and community.
“Orkes Conductor is more important than ever as businesses build applications that require fine-grained workflows, rely on numerous disparate services and APIs, and must now leverage AI for increased productivity and efficiency,” said Jeu George, CEO and co-founder of Orkes. “Revenue has tripled in the past year, with even faster logo growth; our average deal size is in the six figures. Our customers are investing heavily in Orkes across AWS, GCP and Azure deployments as we enable them to have their data and compute residing on their cloud footprint or fully hosted by Orkes on the cloud of their choice.”
Businesses across industries including banking and insurance, entertainment and media, healthcare, and more, use Orkes Conductor because of its tailored offerings for sensitive use cases, deployment and configuration flexibility, and enterprise-grade security posture. Developers love the platform because it allows them to focus on building business logic and architecting complex applications that are easy to manage and troubleshoot, while achieving the resilience and scalability that comes from its battle-tested open-source roots. Some of the use cases for Orkes Conductor include:
- United Wholesale Mortgage (UWM), the largest mortgage lender in the U.S., uses Orkes Conductor to rapidly build complex applications with both code and a visual UI. “Thanks to Orkes Cloud, we barely have to think about orchestration or managing our complex workflows. Our DevOps Architects don’t have to spend 95% of their time managing Conductor; they can focus on creating new services and features,” said Andy French, UWM’s AVP of Platform Automation.
- Foxtel, the leading broadcast and streaming company that is majority-owned by News Corp., is using Orkes Conductor to transform development of its distributed digital processes to ensure new applications are agile, cost-efficient, reliable, and scalable. “Orkes has been instrumental in increasing developer agility, creating cost efficiencies, and building highly reliable and secure applications,” said Foxtel Lead Architect Thisara Alawala.
- Collective, the San Francisco-based back-office platform designed for Businesses-of-One, uses Orkes to transform its tech stack from largely manual processes to streamlined and automated workflows, and to launch into new markets faster than ever before.
- One of the largest healthcare organizations in the world is using Orkes Conductor for orchestration of machine learning pipelines. They chose Orkes over competitive offerings because of its ability to create complex distributed applications easily and run them at scale.
- One of the largest insurance companies in the Asia Pacific region uses Orkes Conductor to modernize its client-facing claims management processes.
“Orkes is leading the creation of one of the most interesting categories in software infrastructure. The founders of Orkes wrote a new playbook for building and operating complex, observable and large-scale applications when they helped create the Conductor open-source project at Netflix. Now, they’ve operationalized this modern approach to application building for the entire enterprise,” said Abhishek Sharma, managing director at Nexus Venture Partners. “Not only is Orkes loved by developers, but the company’s explosive growth in marquee enterprise customers and revenue over the past year is proof positive of its business impact.”
Open-Source Roots at Netflix
Orkes co-CTO Viren Baraiya created the Conductor open-source microservices and workflow orchestration engine, along with co-CTO Boney Sekh and CEO Jeu George, while at Netflix to scale the hyper growth and resulting complexity of its code base. In 2021, the group teamed up with former Microsoft and Amazon product leader Dilip Lukose to found Orkes as an enterprise-grade managed service for engineering teams looking to build their applications on Conductor.
Netflix has since stepped back from maintenance of the open-source Conductor project, and Orkes now owns the project with a new fork that they maintain and govern in close collaboration with the community.
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