It’s right there in the company’s name — Kestra is all about or-kestra-tion. The product acts a bit like a train station manager, but for a business environment: Kestra makes sure the trains run on time, are on the right tracks and are heading to the right station.
In more complex terms, Kestra is an event-driven orchestration and scheduling platform that lets companies define and automate complex data workflows. The startup just raised an $8 million funding round led by Alven, with existing investors Isai and Axeleo participating once again.
What’s interesting about this funding round is that it has come less than a year after the company’s $3 million pre-seed round. Kestra says it now manages 10 times as many workflows as it did a year earlier, with thousands of organizations using its platform to manage hundreds of millions of workflows.
Kestra is also backed by a list of business angels who are quite familiar with the world of data engineering: Tristan Handy from dbt Labs; Michel Tricot from Airbyte; Olivier Pomel from Datadog; Clement Delangue from Hugging Face; Bertrand Diard from Talend; Nicolas Dessaigne from Algolia; and Frédéric Plais from Platform.sh.
Unlike legacy data orchestration systems, Kestra is based on declarative workflows that use YAML (a markup language for data that works with many programming languages). This lets engineering teams create workflows without having to learn a specific programming language. For non-engineering teams working on business intelligence and analytics, Kestra also offers an interface to access and manage workflows.
At its core, Kestra is an open-source project with hundreds of plugins that integrate with existing data stacks. For instance, you can integrate Kestra with several databases, repositories, data warehouses and data lakes. The company also offers an enterprise edition with more features. Its customers include Fila, JCDecaux, Acxiom, Leroy Merlin and Merkle.
Given that Kestra is language agnostic and offers plenty of integrations, you can use it with various data transformation tools like dbt or Airbyte. The startup acts as the automation and scheduling platform, a sort of control panel for data workflows, with monitoring and security features.
It’s the glue that makes everything stick together, meaning companies no longer have to use a legacy orchestration system or rely on several unmaintained scripts and micro-services that make sure that data is regularly propagated from one place to another.
Data orchestration isn’t a new space, but Kestra believes it has a shot at building the next-generation data orchestration platform. “These companies, after a while, they have to switch their systems. They’re using legacy systems that no longer scale. It creates significant productivity issues with performance bottlenecks and security problems,” Kestra’s co-founder and CEO, Emmanuel Darras, told me.
This isn’t Darras’ first foray into Startup Land. He previously co-founded Ankama, a French video game and animation studio behind the online multiplayer game, Dofus. “There are 20 of us spread all over Europe,” he said, referring to his team at Kestra. “It’s kind of funny because I used to work for Ankama, where we had open spaces with hundreds of people in a 9,000-square-meter factory in Roubaix,” he said.
“We think that we’re a young company. There aren’t many of us, and companies come looking for us to set things up with teams that are often much bigger than ours,” Darras said. “So we need to up our game and accelerate our business. And that’s why we’re going to double our workforce over the next six months. We’ll also be expanding to the U.S.”
