Orkes, an industry leader in production-grade AI and workflow orchestration, announced its Series B funding of $60 million. Led by AVP, the funding round also included new investor Prosperity7 Ventures and existing investors Nexus Venture Partners, Battery Ventures and Vertex Ventures US. According to the company, this latest round of funding brings the company’s total funding to around $90 million after raising a $20 million series A in early 2024.
Orkes has said that it is planning to use the funding to further increase the company’s global presence and to continue expanding its suite of tools that will enable large organizations to transition AI pilots into mission-critical production. Solving the “Pilot Trap” Over the past two years alone, organizations have poured enormous investment into LLMs, but many are still captive in the “pilot trap”. Some industry research suggests that although nearly 2/3 of organizations are experimenting with AI, only a handful have deployed autonomous agents into operational lines of business.
Source: Unsplash The key obstacle is not the inability of AI intelligence but the inability to orchestrate it. Alone, AI agents are unpredictable; they “hallucinate”, they don’t know how to deal with edge cases, or they simply don’t have the right integration to internal APIs to be usable. Orkes is the durable execution layer that coordinates those agents: making sure they chew every piece of the business logic, deal with failures, and keep the human in the loop.
“Developers need orchestration, controls, and visibility to run advanced AI and agentic systems with confidence,” said Jeu George, co-founder and CEO of Orkes. “Orkes provides that assurance so developers’ applications and agents behave predictably at scale, even as they push the boundaries of what AI can do.” More News: Omni Raises $120M Series C to Scale AI Analytics Platform From Netflix Origins to Global Enterprise Scale Orkes was started by the team of engineers who built Conductor, an open-source microservices orchestration engine, while they were at Netflix. Conductor was initially built to orchestrate the enormous distributed infrastructure that powered Netflix, but is now used to orchestrate mission-critical systems for global companies such as J.P.
Morgan Chase, Tesla, American Express, and United Wholesale Mortgage. Since forking the project and launching Orkes, the team has expanded the platform’s capabilities to meet the specific demands of the “Agentic Stack”. Key recent innovations include: Agent Runtime: A durable model that blends structured process stages with LLM-driven decisions and tool usage.
MCP Gateway: A bridge that turns internal company APIs into safe, auditable tools that AI agents can use. Prompt-to-Workflow: A natural language tool that allows developers to describe a business process and automatically generate a deployable workflow. Strategic Investment for an AI-First Future The investment by AVP (formerly AXA Venture Partners) and Prosperity7 (the diversified growth fund of Aramco Ventures) underscores the global demand for reliable AI infrastructure.
As part of the deal, Alex Scherbakovsky, General Partner at AVP, will join the Orkes board of directors. “Orkes gives developers the confidence to deploy AI in production with the reliability and scale they expect,” Scherbakovsky noted. “We are excited to support them as they define how AI is operationalized in the enterprise.”