Orkes Secures $60M to Bridge AI's Critical 'Execution Gap'

SANTA CLARA, CA – April 24, 2026 – Orkes, a platform for agent and durable workflow orchestration, has raised $60 million in a Series B funding round to tackle one of the most significant challenges in the technology sector: moving artificial intelligence from experimental pilots to reliable, large-scale production.

The investment was led by AVP, with participation from new investor Prosperity7 Ventures and existing backers Nexus Venture Partners, Battery Ventures, and Vertex Ventures US. The fresh capital injection highlights growing investor confidence in Orkes' ability to close the critical “AI execution gap,” enabling developers to deploy complex AI applications with the governance and stability that enterprises demand.

Tackling the AI 'Execution Gap'

While the promise of AI is vast, the path to realizing its full potential is fraught with difficulty. The year 2026 marks a pivotal moment as enterprises shift their focus from AI experimentation to proving return on investment. Yet, a significant gap persists between creating a successful AI prototype and deploying it safely and effectively within a live business environment. Industry reports paint a stark picture: McKinsey found that as of 2025, two-thirds of companies were still stuck in pilot mode, while a 2024 Deloitte report revealed that 68% of organizations had moved 30% or fewer of their generative AI experiments into full production.

This chasm, known as the AI execution gap, is defined by challenges in reliability, scalability, observability, and governance. AI models that perform well in controlled demos often falter when faced with the unpredictable complexity of real-world data and user interactions. Orkes aims to solve this by providing an enterprise-grade orchestration layer that ensures AI applications and agents behave predictably at scale.

“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,” said Alex Scherbakovsky, general partner at AVP, who will join the Orkes board. “That combination of deep technical credibility and real-world adoption is exactly what we look for at AVP, and we're excited to support Orkes as they define how AI is operationalized in the enterprise.”

From Netflix's Core to AI's Frontier

Orkes’ deep technical credibility is rooted in its origins. The company was founded by the original architects of Conductor, the microservices orchestration platform built at Netflix to manage its massive global scale. Conductor was designed to handle complex, distributed workflows with extreme reliability and was open-sourced in 2016.

This battle-tested foundation provides Orkes with a unique advantage. The company actively maintains and extends the open-source Conductor project, which continues to be used by thousands of organizations, including Fortune 100 leaders like JP Morgan Chase, Atlassian, Tesla, and Oracle. At Netflix itself, internal usage of Conductor has reportedly increased fivefold in recent months, underscoring its enduring value.

Orkes has spent the last four years building upon this powerful legacy, adapting its core principles to the new frontier of AI and agentic systems. By using Conductor as the runtime for its platform, Orkes provides developers with a proven execution layer that inherits the durability, observability, and scalability that powers Netflix.

“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.”

Powering the Rise of Agentic AI

Beyond simple automation, the next wave of AI involves “agentic” systems—autonomous agents capable of making decisions, using tools, and executing multi-step tasks to achieve a goal. Orkes is at the forefront of this shift, providing the tools to build, orchestrate, and operate these agents in production.

Since launching its first agentic orchestration tools in 2023, Orkes has seen them become the fastest-adopted capabilities on its platform. Key offerings include:

• Agentspan: An open-source durable runtime for AI agents, built on Conductor.
• Agentic Workflows: A system for blending structured processes with LLM-driven decisions and human-in-the-loop reviews.
• MCP Gateway: A tool to securely expose internal APIs as tools for AI agents.
• Prompt-to-Workflow: A feature that translates natural language prompts into starter workflows.

This technology is already delivering tangible results. Naveo Commerce, a European e-commerce giant, uses Orkes to power a dynamic fulfillment network. AI agents built on the platform autonomously monitor inventory across a volatile global supply chain, detect disruptions, and resolve issues in real time. “At Naveo, we see agentic orchestration not as incremental innovation but as a structural leap forward,” said Naveo Commerce CEO Jamie Goldring. “Our partnership with Orkes will redefine how order and warehouse management is delivered for the next decade.”

Enterprise Trust and Market Validation

The new funding round follows a period of rapid growth for Orkes, which has tripled its customer base since its $20 million Series A in 2024. The company's client roster includes major enterprises such as United Wholesale Mortgage, Quest Diagnostics, Twilio, LinkedIn, and Australian global energy company Woodside Energy, demonstrating broad market trust in its platform.

“Orkes’ platform brings a richness of engineering capability, and ease at which we are able to outsource state machine processing,” noted Shaun Clements, principal engineer at Woodside Energy. “To complement a great platform, we've been really spoilt with Orkes’ team helping us make the re-platform/transition seamless.”

The participation of Prosperity7 Ventures, the venture arm of Aramco, further validates Orkes’ enterprise-focused strategy. “Orkes is helping define what production-grade AI orchestration looks like,” said Abhishek Shukla, Managing Director at Prosperity7 Ventures US. “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.”