Restate raises $20m to keep AI agents running when software fails

Restate, a Berlin startup founded by the creators of Apache Flink, has raised a $20m Series A. It builds infrastructure that keeps AI agents and backend software running through failures. Singular led the round, with Redpoint Ventures and Capital One Ventures, the company said in a statement on Wednesday. Its total funding is now $27m.

“It never was built for agents in the beginning, but it just happened to be a perfect match for all these problems that agents surface,” Stephan Ewen, its CEO, told TechCrunch.

What durable execution does

Restate sells durable execution. The software records what a program has already done. That lets it carry on correctly after a crash, a restart or a dropped connection. AI agents make this harder, the company says. They run for longer and call models, tools, APIs and other agents along the way.

Restate does not build on a general-purpose database. It uses its own distributed log as the base for execution, state and communication. The company recently launched Bring Your Own Cloud, which runs a managed version inside a customer’s own cloud account.

Hundreds of companies use Restate, it says, including DOSS, Bilt Rewards and Fortune 500 firms. Replit moved its Replit Agent onto Restate. The new agent design uses over 10 times as many durable actions as the old one, Ewen wrote in a blog post.

“It now handles all durable orchestration at Replit, giving us the flexibility to rapidly expand what our agent platform can do,” said Michele Catasta, Replit’s president and head of AI.

Up against Temporal

Restate has closed several six- and seven-figure customer contracts in recent months, Ewen told TechCrunch. Temporal leads the field, according to TechCrunch. It raised a $550m Series E at a $12.55bn valuation in September.

Ewen co-created Apache Flink, an open-source stream processing framework. He was then CTO of Data Artisans, the company built around it. Alibaba bought Data Artisans in 2019 and renamed it Ververica. Ewen founded Restate in 2022 with former colleagues Igal Shilman and Till Rohrmann. Ahmed Farghal, a former Stripe and Meta engineer, joined as the fourth co-founder with the Series A, TechCrunch reported.

Restate will use the money to hire a go-to-market team and more engineers. It will also open a commercial hub in San Francisco. In July, Runta raised a seed round led by a16z for its AI agent infrastructure.