AI Agent 推动耐久性基础设施需求增长，Restate 获 2000 万美元融资

2022 年，Stephan Ewen 联合创办 Restate 时，目标是提供耐久工作流基础设施；当时他无法预见，这类产品后来会在管理 AI Agent 流程方面变得如此有价值。

这家总部位于柏林的创业公司最初希望构建一种执行引擎，使多步骤工作流能够抵御崩溃和网络中断——这也让它非常适合 Agent 时代。

“它一开始从来不是为 Agent 打造的，但恰好完美匹配了 Agent 暴露出来的所有这些问题，”Ewen 向 TechCrunch 表示。

对于 Agent 工作流而言，确保耐久性尤为关键：与传统软件相比，这类工作流运行时间更长，且会沿着本质上不可预测的路径执行。

“你需要确保准确追踪自己做了什么，从而让流程可复现，并获得一致的结果，”Ewen 表示。

AI Agent 的爆发为这家创业公司带来了强劲助力。Ewen 表示，在过去几个月中，Restate 已签下多份金额达六位数和七位数的客户合同。这一势头促使 Restate 获得 2000 万美元 A 轮融资，由 Singular 领投，Redpoint Ventures 和 Capital One Ventures 参投。

这笔新资金将帮助 Restate 挑战耐久性基础设施领域的重量级公司 Temporal。成立于 2019 年的 Temporal 本月早些时候宣布完成 5.5 亿美元 E 轮融资，估值达 125.5 亿美元。

尽管 Restate 是一家规模小得多、但所提供技术日益重要的供应商，它已成功吸引包括氛围编程平台 Replit 在内的知名客户。

Restate 并未在外部数据库之上构建其耐久执行引擎，而是自行开发了存储、复制和冗余层。Ewen 表示，这一架构使 Restate 能够做到格外快速且轻量。

虽然许多公司倾向于将耐久性引擎用于所谓的重型工作流，但 Restate 正试图通过其更高效、更具成本效益的系统改变这种状况。

Ewen 表示，除为 AI 公司提供耐久性能力外，这家创业公司还在服务《财富》500 强客户，其中包括金融领域的企业。

Ewen 表示，尽管 Restate 可被应用于不同使用场景，但客户有着同一种需求——需要一种机制，确保如果某个流程在中途失败，系统能够自动找到恢复并重新组装自身的方法。

在创办 Restate 之前，Ewen 是广受欢迎的开源流处理框架 Apache Flink 的共同创建者，之后担任 Data Artisans 的 CTO；该公司致力于将这一项目商业化。阿里巴巴于 2019 年收购 Data Artisans，并将其更名为 Ververica，Ewen 随后继续担任 CTO 三年。他与来自 Data Artisans 和 Ververica 的前同事 Igal Shilman 和 Till Rohrmann 共同创办了 Restate。此前曾在 Stripe 和 Meta 担任工程师的 Ahmed Farghal，则在 A 轮融资时作为第四位联合创始人加入。

该公司计划利用新资金招聘市场拓展团队、吸纳更多工程师，并扩大其位于旧金山湾区的办公室，以便更接近众多现有及潜在客户。

不过，Ewen 坚持认为，Restate 的能力很快将成为传统科技公司以外企业的必需品。

“如果把时间快进几年，我认为它会成为像数据库一样的工具：几乎所有公司，无论其形态和规模如何，都会有使用它的场景，”他说。

When Stephan Ewen co-founded Restate in 2022 to provide durable workflow infrastructure, he couldn’t have anticipated how valuable such an offering would become for managing AI agent processes.

The Berlin-based startup had set out to build an execution engine that made multistep workflows resilient to crashes and network interruptions — something that made it a fit for the agentic era.

“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,” Ewen told TechCrunch.

Ensuring durability is especially critical for agent workflows, which run longer and take inherently unpredictable paths compared to traditional software.

“You need to make sure you track exactly what you do to make it reproducible and have a consistent outcome,” Ewen said.

The explosion of AI agents has provided a powerful tailwind for the startup. Over the last few months, Restate has closed multiple six- and seven-figure customer contracts, according to Ewen. That momentum has led Restate to secure a $20 million Series A led by Singular with participation from Redpoint Ventures and Capital One Ventures.

The fresh capital will help Restate take on Temporal, the heavyweight in the durable infrastructure space. Temporal, which was founded in 2019, announced a $550 million Series E at a $12.55 billion valuation earlier this month.

Despite being a much smaller provider of increasingly important technology, Restate has already managed to attract high-profile customers, including vibe-coding platform Replit.

Instead of building its durable execution engine on top of an external database, the company developed its own storage, replication, and redundancy layers. This architecture allows Restate to be exceptionally fast and lightweight, Ewen said.

Although many companies tend to use durability engines for so-called heavy-weight workflows, Restate is trying to change this with its more efficient and cost-effective system.

Ewen said that in addition to providing durability for AI companies, the startup is serving Fortune 500 customers, including in the financial space.

While Restate may be applied to different use cases, customers all have the same need — a way to ensure that if something fails mid-process, the system automatically finds a way to put itself back together, Ewen said.

Prior to launching Restate, Ewen was a co-creator of a popular open source stream-processing framework, Apache Flink, and later became the CTO of Data Artisans, a company that was monetizing the project. Alibaba acquired Data Artisans in 2019 and rebranded it as Ververica, where Ewen continued to serve as CTO for three years. He co-founded Restate with former colleagues from Data Artisans and Ververica: Igal Shilman and Till Rohrmann. Ahmed Farghal, who was previously an engineer at Stripe and Meta, joined as the fourth co-founder at the Series A.

The company intends to use its fresh capital to hire a go-to-market team, bring on more engineers, and expand its office in the San Francisco Bay Area to be closer to many of the current and potential customers.

Nevertheless, Ewen insists that Restate’s capabilities will soon be essential to companies outside of traditional tech companies.

“If we fast-forward a couple of years, it’s one of those tools, like a database, that I think pretty much any company will have a use case for, no matter their shape and size,” he said.