Restate has raised a $20 million Series A led by Singular, with participation from Redpoint Ventures and Capital One Ventures, TechCrunch reports. The funding arrives as interest rises in infrastructure that can keep long-running software workflows reliable, especially as AI agents create more complex, failure-prone processes.
The Berlin-based startup, founded in 2022, focuses on durable workflow infrastructure: software meant to keep multistep jobs resilient when systems crash or network calls fail. Co-founder Stephan Ewen told TechCrunch that Restate was not originally built specifically for AI agents, but that the company’s execution engine turned out to match many of the problems agent-based systems expose. TechCrunch writes that the recent surge in AI agents has become a major tailwind for the business.
A crowded market with a larger incumbent
TechCrunch frames Restate as a challenger to Temporal, a much larger company in the same durable infrastructure category. Temporal, founded in 2019, recently announced a $550 million Series E at a $12.55 billion valuation, TechCrunch noted, underscoring how much capital is already flowing into workflow reliability tools.
Restate’s pitch, as described by Ewen to TechCrunch, is that durable execution should not be limited to only heavy-duty workflows. Rather than building on top of an external database, the company developed its own storage, replication and redundancy layers, which Ewen said makes the system faster and lighter.
Early customers and expansion plans
TechCrunch reports that Restate has closed multiple six- and seven-figure customer contracts in recent months, citing Ewen. The company has already landed customers including Replit, and Ewen said Restate also serves Fortune 500 companies, including in financial services.
The startup plans to use the new funding to build out its go-to-market team, hire more engineers and expand its San Francisco Bay Area office so it can be closer to current and prospective customers, TechCrunch reported.
Founded by Apache Flink veterans
Restate was co-founded by Ewen, Igal Shilman and Till Rohrmann. Before starting the company, Ewen was a co-creator of the open-source stream-processing framework Apache Flink and later became CTO of Data Artisans. After Alibaba acquired Data Artisans in 2019 and rebranded it as Ververica, Ewen remained CTO there for three years, TechCrunch reports.
That background helps explain Restate’s focus on infrastructure-level reliability. As AI systems take on longer and less predictable chains of actions, companies building them are increasingly looking for ways to make those workflows reproducible and recoverable when something breaks.
