Restate GmbH, a startup with technology that allows applications to automatically recover from technical issues, today announced that it has closed a $7 million investment.

Redpoint Ventures led the seed round. It was joined by Essence VC, firstminute.capital and multiple angel investors including the founders of Datadog Inc. and Confluent Inc.

Enterprise applications can malfunction for a variety of reasons. Some outages are caused by hardware problems, such as bottlenecks in the network through which an application exchanges data with other workloads. Issues can emerge at the software level as well: the database in which a service keeps its information might suddenly become inaccessible.

Application outages can interrupt a company’s business operations. To minimize the impact of such disruptions, developers must equip their software with the ability to automatically recover from technical issues. That can be a highly complicated and time-consuming process, partly because software teams have to individually address each of the numerous ways their application might malfunction.

“When building applications, we have the most amazing building blocks at our disposal, like fast and scalable databases, simple APIs to access powerful tools like LLMs or messaging, and infrastructure to run them in distributed manner that survives crashes, failures, and outages of entire data centers,” Restate co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Stephan Ewen wrote in a blog post. “And yet, it is still surprisingly hard to build resilient applications, especially when correctness and reliability are paramount, because there are so many loosely coupled moving parts to deal with.”

Restate is working to ease the task. The company has developed an open-source platform, also called Restate, that includes prepackaged features for recovering from software failures. Developers can connect their applications to the platform through a relatively simple series of steps and have it automatically manage any outages that may emerge down the line.

Malfunctions often occur while an application is in the middle of carrying out a computing task. To address such situations, developers must write code that allows the application to pause its work and resume it later. Restate promises to simplify the process.

When a hardware or software issue interrupts a computing task, the affected application often has to repeat the task from scratch. That creates unnecessary delays for users. According to Restate, its platform reduces the need to redo tasks from scratch by saving the parts of the computation that were completed successfully prior to the outage. Once the application recovers, it can simply pick up where it left off.

Restate can also manage technical issues that interrupt the flow of data between different programs. If a network outage makes it impossible for an e-commerce application to request product details from an inventory database, the platform can resend the request once the network comes back online. Moreover, it can shut down inactive parts of an application to avoid unnecessary hardware usage.

In conjunction with its funding announcement today, Restate released the first round-number release of its platform. The new version makes it easier to interact with the software using the Java and Kotlin programming languages. Additionally, developers now have access to more features for optimizing applications’ reliability.

The company is rolling out Restate 1.0 alongside a new commercial offering, Restate Cloud, that makes the platform available as a managed service. It removes the need for customers to manually set up the software or maintain the underlying infrastructure.

Restate will use the proceeds from its newly announced funding round to roll out more product enhancements. As part of the effort, the company plans to release support for additional programming languages and expand Restate Cloud’s feature set. Restate will hire more employees to accelerate the development initiative.

Image: Restate