To put it another way, Kestra is an orchestration and scheduling platform that is event-driven and allows businesses to build and automate intricate data workflows. The business just completed a $8 million fundraising round headed by Alven, with participation from returning investors Isai and Axeleo.

This investment round is noteworthy since it was completed less than a year after the company's $3 million pre-seed funding round. Kestra reports that thousands of enterprises are utilizing its platform to handle hundreds of millions of processes, ten times as many as it managed a year ago.

Additionally, a group of business angels who are well-versed in the field of data engineering support Kestra: dbt Labs' Tristan Handy, Airbyte's Michel Tricot, Datadog's Olivier Pomel, Hugging Face's Clement Delangue, Talend's Bertrand Diard, Algolia's Nicolas Dessaigne, and Platform's Frederic Plaish.

Kestra is built on declarative workflows using YAML, a data markup language that is compatible with a wide range of computer languages, in contrast to conventional data orchestration solutions. As a result, engineering teams may develop workflows without needing to acquire specialized programming knowledge. Kestra also provides an interface to access and manage workflows for teams working on business intelligence and analytics that aren't engineering teams.

Kestra is fundamentally an open-source project that works with hundreds of pre-existing data stacks through integration. As an example, Kestra may be integrated with several repositories, databases, data warehouses, and data lakes. A more feature-rich enterprise edition is also available from the company. Fila, JCDecaux, Acxiom, Leroy Merlin, and Merkle are among of its clients.

You may use Kestra with other data transformation technologies like dbt or Airbyte because it is language neutral and has many integrations. With monitoring and security capabilities, the startup serves as a platform for scheduling and automation, akin to a control panel for data processing.

It serves as the binding agent, so businesses may stop depending on a number of outdated scripts and micro-services or a legacy orchestration system to ensure that data is consistently transferred across locations.

Although data orchestration is not a new field, Kestra thinks it has a chance to become the platform of the future. These businesses eventually have to change their processes. They are still employing antiquated systems that are unscalable. Performance bottlenecks and security difficulties lead to serious productivity challenges, as Emmanuel Darras, co-founder and CEO of Kestra, explained to me.

Darras has ventured into Startup Land before. In the past, he was a co-founder of Ankama, a French animation and video game firm that created the multiplayer online game Dofus. He spoke about his team at Kestra, saying, "There are 20 of us spread all over Europe." "It's funny because I used to work for Ankama in a 9,000-square-meter factory in Roubaix where we had open spaces with hundreds of people," he said.

"We consider ourselves to be a youthful business. Companies seek us out to put things up with teams that are frequently far larger than ours since there aren't many of us, Darras added. Thus, we must improve and grow our company more quickly. We're planning to quadruple our staff over the next six months because of this. Also, we intend to extend to the United States.