Kestra, the maker of a unified open-source data workflow orchestration platform, today announced it has raised $8 million in seed funding to drive the company’s continued expansion across North America and continue its vision to bridge what the company calls the “orchestration gap.”
Alven led the round, and ISAI and Axeleo Capital joined alongside notable leaders from across the tech industry. They include Datadog Inc. Chief Executive Olivier Pomel, Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue and Talend S.A. co-founder Bertrand Diard. This fundraising follows the company’s $3 million pre-seed round raised in October 2023.
Kestra, a company that took its name from the word “orchestration,” argues that the market is flooded with tools that solve particular needs such as automating data pipelines, managing information technology tasks, coordinating processes and providing services. However, they all tend to separate components and need connectors to work together. This gives rise to inherent complexity that creates increased risk and inefficiency.
“The orchestration market is fragmented with siloed solutions addressing specific job scenarios,” said co-founder and CEO Emmanuel Darras. “Business leaders face challenges in unifying best practices and tools across data, infrastructure, business process management, microservices, and more. They seek a unified platform to streamline operations, and this is where Kestra excels.”
To address this challenge, Darras said, Krestra approaches the problem with a solution that provides engineers with application programming interfaces for code and simplified user interface controls for design. That way the platform can appeal to engineers who need advanced API-first “everything as code” solutions to solve their workflow problems and non-technical workers who want to diagram the problem and get going.
According to Kestra, its platform is capable of enabling engineers to build and orchestrate a data or process workflow in under five minutes using a workflow design engine that can be integrated directly into the tools that engineers use every day. The software supports more than 500 integrations including connectors for major technologies including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Azure, Terraform, Docker, GitHub, Databricks and Snowflake. Once ready, it will deploy on any cloud, including AWS and Azure, on-premises or even on a laptop using Docker.
With this funding, the company intends to add more third-party integrations and simplify plugin management to enhance its ecosystem and improve the overall experience of using the platform for engineers.
Since Kestra’s pre-seed round, the company said, it has seen tremendous adoption and intends to use the funding to expand its reach beyond its current European market and into the United States to better support its North American clients. To make that happen, the company plans to grow its team by hiring for roles such as software engineers, architects, solution engineers, DevOps and marketing.