event-driven
(5)
Customer.io
How a lunch-break side project for developers turned into a $100M messaging engine trusted by Notion, Buffer, and thousands of other data-driven teams.
Tony Holdstock-Brown
Tony Holdstock-Brown is the co-founder and CEO of Inngest, a San Francisco developer platform that gives engineers a durable, observable execution layer for background jobs, workflows, and AI agents. A self-described tinkerer since age 10 and former Docker engineer, he started Inngest in 2021 with CTO Dan Farrelly after the two met in a New York co-working space. The company has raised roughly $31.6M, including a $21M Series A led by Altimeter in 2025, on the thesis that in an AI era the real moat is how fast a team can iterate.
Materialize
Materialize is a New York-based data infrastructure company that builds a streaming SQL database. It continuously ingests data from operational systems, incrementally maintains the results of complex SQL queries as always-fresh materialized views, and serves them with low latency. Built on the open-source Timely Dataflow and Differential Dataflow engines and written in Rust, Materialize looks and behaves like Postgres, letting engineers use standard SQL to power real-time analytics, automation, personalization, fraud detection, and - more recently - a live context layer for AI agents and applications.
Inngest
Inngest is a durable execution platform that gives developers reliable background jobs, workflows, and AI-agent orchestration without managing queues or infrastructure. Founded in 2021 by Tony Holdstock-Brown and Dan Farrelly, the San Francisco company combines event streams, queues, and durable step functions into SDKs for TypeScript, Python, and Go, plus AgentKit for multi-agent systems. It has raised roughly $30 million, most recently a $21M Series A led by Altimeter in 2025, and processes over 100 million executions a day for teams including SoundCloud, Resend, and Replit.
Orkes
Orkes is an enterprise workflow orchestration company built by the creators of Netflix's open-source Conductor engine. It offers a fully managed, cloud-hosted platform that lets developers build, run, and scale durable workflows across microservices, APIs, and - increasingly - AI agents, giving companies a reliable way to put long-running, event-driven, and agentic processes into production without reinventing the underlying orchestration plumbing.