CUPERTINO, Calif., Feb. 28, 2022 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ — The developers who built Conductor, Netflix’s popular open-source project for microservices and workflow orchestration, have raised $9.3M in funding to launch Orkes, the first fully managed cloud platform for the fast-growing community of early stage and Fortune 100 companies relying on Conductor, including Tesla, Oracle, American Express, and Cisco. The founding team brings engineering and product leadership experience from Netflix, Google, AWS, and Microsoft Azure.
The round was co-led by Battery Ventures and Vertex Ventures US alongside notable cloud infrastructure angel investors Mahendra Ramsinghani and Gokul Rajaram as well as senior executives from companies like Amazon and Facebook. Battery Ventures General Partner Dharmesh Thakker led his firm’s investment and will be involved with observer status, and Vertex US General Partner Sandeep Bhadra will join the Orkes board of directors to help guide the company’s growth. Orkes will use the funding to build out its team, create an enterprise ecosystem, and support the Conductor open-source platform and community.
“Conductor is critical infrastructure for thousands of businesses, but as an open-source project you still have to build it, manage it, and host it yourself,” said Jeu George, CEO and co-founder of Orkes. “We built Orkes so developers can focus on their core software instead of the operational details of running Conductor at scale; with Orkes they no longer have to worry about things like high availability, cluster management, or security patching.”
“The adoption curve of Conductor is among the fastest I’ve seen, and to be able to support the original developer team as they commercialize it is an incredible opportunity for us,” said Battery Ventures’ Thakker, an investor who has backed some of the industry’s highest-profile cloud, open-source and data-focused companies. “Orkes has the right team to bring enterprise-grade support and cloud services to this thriving community.”
“Orkes’ founders set the stage for how to use microservices when they built and open sourced Conductor at Netflix,” said Vertex US’s Bhadra. “With the recent inflection in microservices adoption, developers at companies globally are experiencing a similar transition and are turning to Conductor to orchestrate complex business processes for the past few years. The team has worked with each other for more than a decade and we could not be more excited to partner with them on this adventure.”
The rise of microservices and complexity of software drives Conductor’s popularity
Many businesses have moved to a composable framework of microservices where disparate pieces of software are connected like building blocks, meaning software engineers increasingly need tools to help them abstract, visualize, and execute these complex workflows. Netflix built Conductor to do this for its own microservices-based process flows, and later open-sourced the project to benefit the entire industry adapting to this growing complexity.
Now, thousands of businesses rely on Conductor to orchestrate the microservices workflows for complex applications. A 2020 O’Reilly survey of 1,500 companies found that 75 percent were using microservices, and only 10 percent of them were long-term users of five years or more. The vast majority were recent adopters. A January 2022 McKinsey report stressed the importance of adopting microservices as fundamental to agile transformation.
Orkes takes the operational complexities out of Conductor deployments by offering a managed cloud service with added enterprise features so developers can focus on building business logic and architecting complex applications that are easy to manage and troubleshoot. Orkes Cloud is now available for AWS with Google Cloud Platform and Azure on the roadmap.
“Conductor is an integral part of our software stack. It helps us build the complex workflows required for automating network operations, particularly as preventing network outages has never been more critical for our Fortune 500 customers,” said Gerhard Wieser, CEO and co-founder at network automation platform FRINX. “The launch of Orkes is exciting for our team as it means expanded support and new features to deepen the value we get out of Conductor.”
Orkes is also launching play.orkes.io, a sandbox for developers to try, learn and test and experience the power of Conductor before setting it up in production. To sign up for an Orkes Cloud account, go to https://orkes.io/cloud.
Management pedigree
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. Baraiya went on to lead engineering for Google’s Firebase, George to senior engineering at Uber, and Sekh headed up the payments platform for popular stock trading and investing app Robinhood. In 2021, the group teamed up with George’s former colleague at Microsoft, CPO Dilip Lukose, to found Orkes. Lukose led Azure’s cloud product teams while at Microsoft and was also an early engineering leader at AWS. He also witnessed the rapid internal adoption of Conductor during his time as the Director of platform products at Redfin.
About Orkes
Orkes is the premier microservices and workflow orchestration platform redefining the way companies build and scale complex software applications with high reliability. Founded in 2021 by seasoned product and engineering leaders from Google, Netflix, AWS, and Microsoft Azure, Orkes provides an enterprise-grade, cloud-hosted version of the popular Netflix Conductor open-source platform used by Fortune 100 companies and international corporations. Backed by Battery Ventures and Vertex Ventures US, the company is headquartered in Cupertino, CA. Learn more at http://www.orkes.io.
Media Contact:
Marie Williams
Coderella
415-689-4029
[email protected]
Media Contact
Marie Williams, Coderella, +1 415-689-4029, [email protected]
SOURCE Orkes
