Seattle-based Thepoural has given its name for the past few years in the world of microservices. In particular, it provides a platform for organizing cluttered businesses of integration and updates across different services and apps in the cloud. However, the AI boom quickly came to work. Now, Tuperal has raised a $146 million growth round to build what the next chapter appears to be in that space. We build microservices to support new areas such as AI, particularly Agent AI.
The investment is in R&D. At the end of 2024, the company said it will launch a new feature called Nexus on its time cloud platform to improve security, fault isolation and modularity, allowing more cross-cloud work along with Azure’s public cloud availability and continuing to develop “R&D for AI use cases.” Tuperal also uses some of its funds to invest in sales and marketing.
Tiger Global leads the round with participation from previous supporters, including Index Venture (leading Series B) and Sequoia Capital (leading Series A). In this Series C, Tuperal is currently raising $350 million.
The round is pretty big, but the devil is in detail. TechCrunch understands that the company’s valuation in this round is $1.72 billion in post money (“a little up.”) according to CEO and co-founder Samar Abbas.
The company’s previous funding (a $75 million Series B expansion announced in February 2023) was delivered at a fixed price of $1.5 billion. Earlier, Prime Unicorn Index reported that its valuation fell at a low price of $880 million.
Abbas and his co-founder Maxim Fateev (CTO) started temporarily after the pair worked together on Uber. There, they co-developed Cadence, Uber’s open source orchestration engine designed to mediate requests and interactions between different microservices.
Knowing that the need for better microservice management has expanded to many organizations, the pair sees the opportunity to attack themselves, and something temporary emerges.
ThePoural’s microservices orchestration platform precedes the hype around AI. Since 2019, customers have used it to manage the capabilities and actions that combine data from a number of different apps: payment processing, customer onboarding, order management, identity verification, infrastructure management.
However, recently, it has emerged as a major use case for microservices by bringing together a linguistic model for working beyond data from many other services of AI “agents” tailored to a particular use case to fill out the promises of AI-built services, particularly agent AI.
Our current client list shows which companies use ThePoural’s platform to manage microservices, legacy and more, as well as which companies are already using for AI. The list includes boxes, Instacart, snaps, stripes, and Nvidia.
Nvidia is a well-known name on its famous list. A year ago, the GPU giant unveiled a microservices software platform called NIM to streamline the deployment of AI models (both custom and pre-trained) in production environments. One of the latest developments for its microservices platform involves helping customers develop AI agents to address trust and safety.
It’s not like that before in the past, but time is still growing. The company told TechCrunch that revenues have risen 4.4 times over the past 18 months. This is compared to the 20x growth claimed over the 12 months since February 2023. Meanwhile, the company said its Thipeal.io open source platform currently has 183,000 active users. Its enterprise managed service, Tuperal Cloud, claims 2,500 customers.
There is no argument that “durable execution,” a category pioneered by Abbas and Fateev, is less lively than the Ghibli-style AI image generator. However, the need to ensure that long workflows are running is realistic, with other teams entering the field ever since, such as workflows like code startups Restate and Orkes.
Abbas was the CEO of The Tuperal since he and Fateev traded their roles last April. With “Zero Report,” Fateev is currently in charge of technology and has set a long-term vision. “I’m someone who thinks about the steps we need to take to make that mission come to fruition,” Abbas said.
These steps include an increase in the number of employees from around 250 to over 300 in the coming months and a “big push at EMEA.” [Asia-Pacific & Japan]He said.
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