Orkes, the workflow orchestration platform built by the original architects of Netflix’s Conductor, closed a $60 million Series B round on April 23, 2026. AVP led the round with participation from new investor Prosperity7 Ventures and existing backers Nexus Venture Partners, Battery Ventures, and Vertex Ventures US. The raise brings total funding to approximately $90 million.

The Production Gap

The funding arrives at a specific inflection point. Gartner projects AI software spending will reach $450 billion in 2026, but McKinsey found that two-thirds of companies were still stuck in pilot mode as of 2025, according to Business Wire via Morningstar. The gap between building an AI agent demo and running one in production is largely an orchestration problem: agents hallucinate, fail on edge cases, and lack the integrations to be operationally useful without a durable execution layer coordinating them.

Orkes positions itself as that layer. Its platform handles state management, failure recovery, human-in-the-loop escalation, and observability for agentic workflows, all built on top of Conductor, the open-source orchestration engine the founding team created at Netflix in 2016.

Growth Since Series A

Since its $20 million Series A in 2024, Orkes has tripled its customer base to over 3,000 global enterprises, according to VentureBurn. Named customers include United Wholesale Mortgage, Quest Diagnostics, Twilio, LinkedIn, European commerce platform Naveo Commerce, and Australian energy company Woodside Energy. The open-source Conductor project, which Orkes actively maintains, counts Netflix, JP Morgan Chase, Atlassian, Tesla, Oracle, American Express, and GE Healthcare among its users. Netflix’s own Conductor usage has increased 5x in recent months, per the company’s announcement.

“Orkes’ platform brings a richness of engineering capability, and ease at which we are able to outsource state machine processing,” Shaun Clements, principal engineer at Woodside Energy, said in the announcement.

Product Stack

Orkes has expanded its platform with several agent-specific capabilities:

  • Agentspan: an open-source durable runtime for AI agents that executes on Conductor’s orchestration engine
  • MCP Gateway: a bridge that turns internal APIs into auditable tools AI agents can use
  • Prompt-to-Workflow: natural language to deployable workflow generation

Agentic orchestration has become the fastest-adopted capability on the platform since its 2023 launch, according to the company.

The Infrastructure Bet

AVP General Partner Alex Scherbakovsky, who is joining the Orkes board, told Business Wire that the investment reflects conviction in orchestration as the critical missing layer: “Orkes gives developers the confidence to deploy AI in production with the reliability, control, and scale they expect.”

The round positions Orkes alongside a growing cohort of companies building the infrastructure layer between frontier models and production workloads. BAND raised $17 million for agent interaction infrastructure this week. Cloudflare shipped Agent Memory and a multi-provider AI Platform during its Agents Week. The common thesis: the bottleneck for enterprise AI is no longer model capability. It is the orchestration, governance, and reliability tooling required to run agents at scale.

Published: April 25, 2026