Our Investment in Orkes: $9.3M in Funding to Optimize Workflow and Microservices at Scale

Software architects today depend on hundreds, if not thousands, of disparate microservices to build complex workflows. These workflows are the foundation of every modern application. For example, when a consumer buys an item from an online store, dozens of microservices work behind the scenes to ensure the entire process is orchestrated quickly, effectively, and securely. The process is designed to be invisible to the shopper, but the back-end work is a complex dance that ensures payment verification, credit card processing, user identification, and product logistics are all handled smoothly and any errors are handled gracefully

In order to manage this complexity, developers at hundreds of companies such as Tesla, Oracle, American Express, and Cisco have been organically turning to Conductor, a popular open-source project for microservices orchestration and workflow that was developed by senior engineers at Netflix. Moreover, these developers have been contributing back to the project and asking for support to integrate Conductor with their internal tools and systems. Conductor’s founding engineers – Boney Sekh, Jeu George, and Viren Baraiya – realized there was a clear need for a managed and reliable toolkit built around Conductor that businesses everywhere could use. They teamed up with an old friend and colleague, Dilip Lukose, who has led product management for popular cloud services like AWS Cloudfront, Azure Edge CDN, and Azure Web Application Firewall, as well as the platform team at Redfin, to focus full time on this opportunity and launch Orkes.

Today, we are pleased to announce our investment in Orkes, co-leading a $9.3M seed round along with Battery Ventures and an impressive roster of angel investors. Sandeep Bhadra, General Partner at Vertex US, is joining the Board of Directors and is partnering closely with the founding team to realize its mission of building a highly reliable, world-class product at scale.

“It’s a great mix of massive market opportunity combined with a stellar engineering and operations team,” says Sandeep. “The team created Conductor because they needed to solve a problem they encountered every day. I’m confident this is the right team to build the future of microservices.”

What’s next? In short order, Orkes has launched Orkes Cloud, a developer playground, and is rolling out commercial installations of the service. They’ll be using this funding to build the team, hire across all functions, and support the Conductor open-source platform and community. If you’re interested in joining the team, please visit the Orkes career page.

Bonus fun fact:  Jeu founded Bollywood and celebrity news site Pinkvilla.com in 2007 with his wife Nandini, while both were working as engineers at Microsoft. Today, Pinkvilla is India's largest Bollywood website, incorporating both original editorial and user-generated content.