A month after reports emerged about its fundraising plans, Temporal Technologies Inc. today confirmed that it has closed a $550 million investment at a $12.55 billion valuation.

Lightspeed and Wellington Management co-led the Series E round. They were joined by Goldman Sachs, Tiger Global, T. Rowe Price, SV Angel and several existing investors.

There are numerous technical issues that can take an application offline. Mitigating all of them requires engineers to write a significant amount of custom code, which slows software projects. Temporal offers an eponymous open-source tool that automates much of the work involved in the process.

When an application starts a new task, Temporal creates a log that tracks its progress. If the application crashes mid-task, the log registers the last sub-step that it completed successfully. The program can use that information to pick up where it left off once the outage is over.

Developers can customize how Temporal resumes interrupted workflows. The platform makes it possible to adjust parameters such as the number of times a program retries a task. If the retries fall short, Temporal can activate a standby copy of the program and have it take over the workflow.

Under the hood, Temporal uses an ensemble of programs called Workers to carry out tasks. Workers determine which task they should perform with the help of a module called a task queue. It contains a list of the activities that must be performed to fulfill a given user request.

By default, Workers pick tasks from the backlog autonomously. Developers can modify that arrangement by configuring a task queue to route tasks to specific Workers. For example, Temporal could require that calculations related to the same user request be carried out by Workers deployed on the same server. Reducing the physical distance between programs enables them to exchange data faster, which boosts application performance. 

Temporal generates revenue with a managed cloud-based version of its service. Temporal Cloud, as it’s called, automates tasks such as coordinating task queues. The Workers that carry out application tasks run on customers’ own infrastructure. The company says that its platform lends itself to, among other tasks, improving the reliability of artificial intelligence workloads.

“As agents take on more critical work across more systems, every additional step creates another place to fail,” said Temporal co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Samar Abbas. “In production, that work has to survive those failures and finish reliably. Temporal was built for this problem.”

Temporal disclosed today that its annualized revenue recently topped $250 million after more than tripling over the past year. The company’s customer count, in turn, is up 139%. Temporal Cloud has more than 4,300 paying users including Nvidia Corp., OpenAI Group PBC and other major tech firms.

Temporal will invest the proceeds from its funding round in product development. The company also plans to buy more infrastructure and accelerate its go-to-market efforts.

Image: Temporal