Orkes, a platform that helps developers run AI agents and automated workflows reliably in production environments, has raised $60 million in a Series B funding round. The company was built by the engineers who originally created Netflix’s internal workflow system, and its CEO and co-founder is Jeu George.

The raise comes at a time when most companies are struggling to move AI out of test environments and into real operations. According to McKinsey, two-thirds of organizations were still running AI pilots rather than full deployments as recently as 2025. The issue is not a shortage of AI tools. What most companies lack is a reliable layer for managing, monitoring, and governing AI in production. That is what Orkes is built to provide.

AVP led the round, with new investor Prosperity7 Ventures joining alongside existing backers Nexus Venture Partners, Battery Ventures, and Vertex Ventures US. The Series B follows a $20 million Series A closed in 2024.

Why AI Deployment Is Harder Than It Looks

Gartner projects global AI software spending will reach approximately $450 billion in 2026, as companies shift from testing ideas to expecting results. That kind of investment creates pressure to actually deliver. And delivery, it turns out, is the hard part.

Running an AI agent in a controlled demo is one thing. Running that same agent inside a business-critical process, day after day, at scale, requires something more. Developers need to be able to see what AI agents are doing at any given moment, catch problems before they spread, and bring a human into the loop when a decision requires it. Orkes is designed around those requirements. The platform handles orchestration, meaning it coordinates the different steps in a workflow; observability, meaning developers can monitor everything in real time; and governance, meaning there are controls in place to keep AI behavior predictable and auditable.

“Orkes gives developers the confidence to deploy AI in production with the reliability, control, and scale they expect, and global enterprises rely on the platform for mission-critical operations. […] we’re excited to support Orkes as they define how AI is operationalized in the enterprise.”

Alex Scherbakovsky, General Partner at AVP and incoming Orkes board member

How Orkes Will Use the $60 Million

The funding will go toward expanding Orkes’ AI tooling and growing its presence across industries and regions. Three capabilities sit at the center of its current AI offering. The Agent Runtime lets developers combine structured process steps with AI-driven decisions and points where a human can review or intervene. The MCP Gateway turns internal company APIs into tools that AI agents can access safely and consistently. An API, in this context, is a way for different software systems to communicate. The third tool, Prompt-to-Workflow, lets a developer describe a workflow in plain language and receive a working draft to edit and deploy.

AI tools have become the fastest-adopted part of the Orkes platform since they launched in 2023. The customer base has tripled since the Series A, with organizations like United Wholesale Mortgage, Quest Diagnostics, Twilio, LinkedIn, Naveo Commerce, and Woodside Energy now using the platform.

“Orkes is helping define what production-grade AI orchestration looks like. Its platform gives enterprises a single, governed engine to coordinate LLMs, tools, microservices, and human review, so AI can safely sit in the middle of mission-critical workflows. We’re excited to support the team as they bring this capability to more customers and industries.”

Abhishek Shukla, Managing Director at Prosperity7 Ventures US

Orkes’ Origins at Netflix and Its Growth Since

The company traces its roots to Netflix. In 2016, the engineers who would later found Orkes built an internal system called Conductor to manage Netflix’s increasingly complex, distributed software architecture. A distributed architecture means the system runs across many separate services that need to be coordinated. Conductor became open source and is still maintained by Orkes today. Developers at organizations including JP Morgan Chase, Atlassian, Tesla, Oracle, American Express, and GE Healthcare use the open-source version.

The commercial Orkes platform extends that foundation with additional security, monitoring tools, and AI-specific capabilities. The company positions itself as an execution layer rather than just a workflow builder. In practice, this means the platform is designed to stay stable and reliable under real-world conditions, not just during testing.

Orkes now counts hundreds of thousands of developers among its users, with millions of installs worldwide. One example of how enterprises are applying it: Naveo Commerce, a European commerce company, uses Orkes to manage order fulfillment across a global supply chain. AI agents running on the platform track inventory, spot disruptions, and address problems in real time, without waiting for someone to intervene manually.

“Developers need orchestration, controls, and visibility to run advanced AI and agentic systems with confidence. Orkes provides that assurance so developers’ applications and agents behave predictably at scale, even as they push the boundaries of what AI can do.”

Jeu George, Co-founder and CEO of Orkes

The Investors Behind the Round

AVP is an independent investment firm focused on technology companies across Europe and North America. It manages more than €2.5 billion in assets and has invested in over 60 companies since 2016. Alex Scherbakovsky led the Orkes deal and is joining the company’s board.

Prosperity7 Ventures is the venturing fund of Aramco Ventures, itself the investment arm of Aramco. The fund focuses on long-term bets on emerging technologies. Returning investors Nexus Venture Partners, Battery Ventures, and Vertex Ventures US also took part in the round.

Orkes raised a $20 million Series A in 2024. Based on the rounds disclosed, the company has raised at least $80 million to date.

Origianl Creator: Ekaterina Pisareva
Original Link: https://justainews.com/companies/funding-news/orkes-raises-60m-to-scale-ai-workflow-orchestration/
Originally Posted: Thu, 23 Apr 2026 18:45:32 +0000