Orkes, a microservices orchestration platform, secures $20M in Series A funding

Orkes, a startup founded by the creators of Netflix’s Conductor microservices orchestration platform, has raised a $20 million Series A round, building upon its earlier $9.3 million seed round in 2022. Nexus Venture Partners led the new funding round, with participation from existing investors Battery Ventures and Vertex Ventures US.

Conductor was initially developed at Netflix in 2015 to help the company’s development teams cope with its rapid growth. Recognizing its popularity within Netflix, the creators decided to open-source the project in 2016, leading to its widespread adoption by companies worldwide. When Netflix announced it would discontinue maintaining Conductor in December, the creators left the company to launch Orkes, ensuring the continued development and support of the platform.

Orkes provides an enterprise-grade microservices platform based on the open-source Conductor project, offering companies a solution to manage their tech stack efficiently. By abstracting away infrastructure and orchestration challenges, Orkes enables organizations to focus more on building applications. Among its thousands of customers are prominent companies like Tesla, United Wholesale Mortgage, and Foxtel, showcasing the platform’s broad appeal and utility across various industries.

After taking over the Conductor open-source project from Netflix, Orkes has launched a Conductor Working Group and aims to establish a Conductor Foundation in the future. The company envisions potentially joining a larger foundation similar to the trajectory of Netflix’s Spinnaker project, which transitioned from open sourcing to setting up its own foundation and then integrating with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

Currently, Orkes provides Conductor as a fully managed platform on the customer’s preferred cloud infrastructure, along with a Conductor-based AI orchestration platform.

Following the model of other successful open-source companies, Orkes offers premium enterprise services around the Conductor project. This approach has garnered momentum from existing open-source users who seek a managed service offering. Orkes’ chief product officer, Dilip Lukose, highlighted the company’s commitment to delivering a trusted and managed solution based on Conductor.

Abhishek Sharma, managing director at Nexus Venture Partners, praised Orkes for pioneering a new category in software infrastructure. He commended the company’s founders for developing a modern approach to building and operating complex applications, leveraging their experience with the Conductor project at Netflix to benefit enterprises at scale.