An Open Letter to the Temporal User Community

Today Temporal Technologies announced the $103M round of financing led by Index Ventures with all our major investors (Sequoia, Amplify, Addition, Madrona) participating. This brings the company to a 1.5 billion valuation. We welcomed Mike Volpi to the company board. We are really excited to leverage his vast experience helping to build iconic open-source companies.

Five years ago Uber's growth was explosive. Its developers were spending the largest portion of their time not on the new features but on ensuring the reliability of their code. Samar and I had a vision and experience to help them. Thus the new project was born. We didn't realize it back then, but all the stars had aligned to create something that had the potential to affect the whole industry.

We innovated a new way to write reliable applications that developers really liked.
The platform was designed and built as a highly scalable multi-tenant service from the get-go.
It was battle tested at Uber through dozens of use cases.
It was built as an open-source project under a permissive MIT license.

We had the vision but still weren't prepared for how fast a strong community formed around the project. It was amazing to learn how software products and services that all of us use daily rely on Temporal to power critical business use cases. We were really grateful to the early adopters. Their trust and enthusiasm encouraged and helped us to start Temporal.

The company is a little over 2 years old, the community has grown exponentially, and it is just the beginning. We made a decision to keep the MIT license and to avoid having proprietary components (aka open-core model). The only way we plan to monetize the project is by providing a hosted offering (Temporal Cloud). Our cloud already has dozens of paying customers, from single-person startups up to publicly traded companies. We are working hard on the general availability of our cloud.

We recently asked ourselves how we would define Temporal's success. We decided that we are not there until:

Reliability is easy and inexpensive for applications of all sizes.
Every developer is aware of Temporal and understands its value proposition.
Developers of any skill level and experience can use Temporal.
A namespace in Temporal Cloud becomes as reliable, predictable, and commonplace as an S3 bucket.
There is a vivid ecosystem of open-source projects that leverage Temporal as an underlying engine.

The new financing validates our business model and gives us the opportunity to pursue these goals.

How we plan to use this new funding to help you:

Improve our open-source software. We'll have an update on this later today if you join our live stream.
Create more and better public goods for the developer community, adding education, conferences, and community support to what we already do.
Enhance our cloud service to make it available to everyone.
Grow the ecosystem of technologies that work with or build on Temporal.

How you can help us:

Spread the word - so many of our best user stories started with one engineering team learning about Temporal by word of mouth.
Participate in the community - we are committed to building out in the open and want your participation and your feedback.

If you're reading this and are new to Temporal:

Sign up for the live introductory sessions we're running this week and next.
Or explore some of the common Temporal use cases and get started.