Startup: Temporal
VC: Bogomil Balkansky, Sequoia; Jerry Chen, Greylock; Sudip Chakrabarti, Madrona; and Aaron Jacobson, NEA
Relationship: Balkansky and Chakrabarti are investors. Chen and Jacobson have no relation and just think it's cool.
Total funding raised: $25.5 million
Headquarters: Bellevue, WA
What it does: App developers are increasingly adopting a "microservice" architecture, in which a large app with lots of features is broken up into small, independent parts that talk to one another. Temporal's software makes it easier for developers to fix problems when one of their microservices fails.
Why it will boom in 2021: "Creating software applications that handle failures gracefully is a very complex and time-consuming engineering problem,"Balkansky said. "Temporal solves this."
With customers like Snap, Box, Coinbase and Checkr, "we anticipate greater demand next year as more companies continue to migrate to microservice architectures," he added.
Chakrabarti said that Temporal helps "developers build invincible applications."
By hiding complex data engineering from developers, Temporal is "making it easy to build and orchestrate these apps," Chen said.
"Temporal's open-source 'workflow-as-code' solution bakes in resiliency from the start, freeing up developers to focus on writing impactful business logic code," Jacobson said.