Tech
Temporal CEO Samar Abbas on the ‘massive platform shift’ in AI fueling the startup’s $5B valuation
Temporal co-founders Samar Abbas and Maxim Fateev have been tackling the same distributed systems problem since their days at Amazon, Microsoft, and Uber. But the AI boom has put the problem “on steroids” as agents move to production, according to Abbas — and investors have taken notice.
Temporal last week announced a $300 million Series D round led by Andreessen Horowitz, pushing its valuation to $5 billion — up from $2.5 billion in October.
Temporal’s revenue increased more than 380% year-over-year, reflecting demand for infrastructure services from companies using AI agents that are taking on more responsibilities.
“There is a massive platform shift happening,” Abbas told GeekWire. “And there is a whole layer of infrastructure being developed right now.”
Temporal’s pitch is something it calls “durable execution,” a new category Abbas says is about giving developers a simpler programming model for long-running, distributed workflows. Instead of wiring together queues, databases, retry mechanisms, and timers to handle failures, engineers write their logic as normal code and Temporal makes it durable behind the scenes.
Abbas and Fateev launched Temporal in 2019, after they helped build an open-source orchestration engine called Cadence during their time at Uber. The tool was used by companies including HashiCorp, LinkedIn, Airbnb, Coinbase, and others.
“Both of us have been obsessed about this problem space,” Abbas said, describing Temporal as “literally the fourth or fifth time we are building a similar system.”
During the cloud era, Abbas said, Temporal became a “reliability backbone” for developers building mission-critical applications. Now, as AI models get smarter and agents hit production, the company is seeing huge scale.
“We are kind of becoming the core piece of infrastructure which is powering the AI agentic wave,” Abbas said.
Temporal’s customer base ranges from OpenAI, which uses the platform for image generation, to Replit, which uses Temporal to orchestrate coding agents over extended sessions.
“As long-running agents become a primary driver of enterprise value, the execution layer beneath them becomes indispensable,” investors with Andreessen Horowitz wrote in a blog post. “Temporal wasn’t built in reaction to generative AI; it was built to make complex systems durable. But the agentic era has made that need undeniable.”
Asked about a potential AI bubble and broader hype, Abbas pointed to customers like Abridge in healthcare, where doctors can focus on patients instead of note-taking. He also noted transformation across legal workflows, coding agents, customer support, and research.
“There is real value being delivered to real users,” he said.
He envisions a future where “every human on the planet can be called a software developer” and the cost of building software keeps falling, driving demand for a reliable execution backbone.
Temporal is built as a remote-first company, with around 375 employees and 62 of them in the Seattle area. Abbas and Fateev have been based in the region for decades, and many early employees are here as well.
Abbas, who was previously CTO (he swapped roles with Fateev in 2024) said the software infrastructure expertise in Seattle is a good match for trends that Temporal is riding. “Seattle has the right ingredients of talent,” he said. “We’ll be doubling down and growing in the Seattle area.”
As for advice to other founders riding the AI wave, Abbas said it’s about getting clarity on how you deliver value and avoiding all other distractions. “Just know who your users are — are they able to drive value from the product you are building?” He said Temporal is laser-focused on that strategy — and it seems to be working.