Interim CEO Samar Abbas on ‘major platform shift’ in AI making startup worth $5B
Interim founders Samar Abbas and Maxim Fateev have been grappling with the same problem of distributed systems since their days at Amazon, Microsoft, and Uber. But the AI boom has put the problem “on steroids” as agents move to productivity, 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.
Interim revenue increased more than 380% year-over-year, demonstrating the need for infrastructure services for companies using multitasking AIs.
“There’s a huge platform shift happening,” Abbas told GeekWire. “And there’s a whole layer of infrastructure that’s being developed right now.”
Temporal’s pitch is something it calls “long-term performance,” a new category that Abbas says is about giving developers a simple planning model for long-term performance, and distribution of work. Instead of combining queues, databases, retry methods, and timers to handle failures, developers write their logic as regular code and Temporarily makes it robust behind the scenes.
Abbas and Fateev launched Temporal in 2019, after helping 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.
“We’ve both been busy with this problem space,” Abbas said, describing Temporal as “the fourth or fifth time we’ve built the same program.”
In the era of the cloud, Abbas said, Temporal became a “reliable backbone” for developers building mission-critical applications. Now, as AI models get smarter and agents start to produce, the company is seeing a bigger scale.
“We’re like being part of the infrastructure that’s powering the AI wave,” Abbas said.
Temporal’s customer base ranges from OpenAI, which uses a visualization platform, to Replit, which uses Temporal to schedule coding agents at extended intervals.
“As long-term agents become a key driver of business value, a layer of execution beneath them becomes useful,” wrote investors with Andreessen Horowitz in a blog post. “Temporal wasn’t designed to respond to productive AI; it was designed to make complex systems resilient. But the age of agency has made that need undeniable.”
Asked about the potential AI bubble and the broader hype, Abbas pointed to clients like Abridge in healthcare, where doctors can focus on patients instead of taking notes. He also noted the change in the entire legal workflow, coding agents, customer support, and research.
“There’s real value that’s brought to real users,” he said.
He envisions a future where “everyone in the world can be called a software developer” and the cost of building software keeps falling, driving the need for a reliable killer backbone.
Temporal was originally built as a remote company, with approximately 375 employees, 62 of whom are in the Seattle area. Abbas and Fateev have been based in the region for decades, and many of the original workers are here.
Abbas, the former CTO (who switched roles with Fateev in 2024) said the software infrastructure technology in Seattle is a good fit for the trends Temporal is riding. “Sattle has the right ingredients of talent,” he said. “We will be doubling and expanding in the Seattle area.”
As for advice to other innovators riding the AI wave, Abbas said it’s about figuring out how to deliver value and avoiding all other distractions. “Just know who your users are – are they able to drive value from the product you’re building?” He said Temporal is laser-focused on that strategy — and it seems to be working.
