Inngest, a startup that simplifies the process of building and managing serverless backends for developers, has recently secured a $6.1 million funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Other investors who participated in the company’s $3 million seed round, including GGV, Afore Capital, and Vercel CEO and co-founder Guillermo Rauch, also contributed to this latest funding round.
At its core, Inngest offers developers the ability to focus on creating serverless, event-driven backend workflows without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure and execution processes that allow for scalability. In fact, it was working with larger clients, such as Soundcloud, that sparked the need for many of Inngest’s recent updates and improvements.
Inngest’s CEO, Tony Holdstock-Brown, and CTO, Dan Farrelly, shared with me that their team has added new flow control features, making it easier to manage concurrency at the user level. This is especially helpful for those building and managing multi-tenant applications, as well as handling high-volume workloads. These features also provide more control for companies utilizing AI workloads, as resources for these tasks can be scarce and prone to latency.
The company initially focused on creating what they call “durable workflows,” which allow for long periods of idle time and pick up quickly when needed. Inngest manages the queues and database states for these functions, without the need for any additional work from developers. Combining this with the newly added flow control features unlocks numerous possibilities for users.
“As more clients began implementing durable workflows on our platform, we noticed a gap in how to effectively build production applications,” Farrelly explained. “Our durability and reliability, combined with the flow control features, create a solid foundation for any application. We also discovered that our enterprise clients needed both durable workflows and flow control, and they work perfectly together.”
With the rise of AI, many companies are now building their applications on top of this technology, whether it be homegrown models or utilizing vendors like OpenAI. These users are often competing for limited resources, and Inngest has found a solution. “Our multi-level virtual queues allow for greater control over the throughput, even when there are numerous users competing for the same resources,” Farrelly noted. “We also recently added prioritization, which has been helpful for those using OpenAI or other model resources.”
Inngest has also expanded its language support, now offering not only a TypeScript SDK but also options for Python and Go. The best part? Users can switch between languages seamlessly, without disrupting their functions. “We started with serverless and TypeScript but quickly realized there was more demand,” Holdstock-Brown explained. “We added Python and Go SDKs, and what’s interesting is that users can rewrite functions from TypeScript to Go without losing state. We allow for live language and cloud migrations.”
The team has also recently launched two new features, Replay and observability tools. Replay allows teams to recover from incidents by re-running failed jobs in bulk, while the observability tools provide valuable insight into the overall system and performance.
With this new round of funding, Inngest plans to continue expanding its team to maintain reliability and support increasing user demand. “We are very selective about our hires, but as we grow, we need more hands on deck,” Holdstock-Brown stated. “Thankfully, our upfront planning and architecture have allowed us to scale without major issues. We will continue to strengthen and refine our system.”
Additionally, as enterprises began using Inngest, they realized that they were already sending large amounts of data through the platform. This sparked requests for assistance with exporting data to their data warehouses and performing ETL tasks. This aligns with the current trend in the enterprise space of consolidating where companies are spending their resources. A single tool that can handle multiple tasks is highly sought after.
