Kestra, a Paris-based company behind an open-source platform for orchestrating data pipelines, AI workflows and infrastructure automation, announced a $25m Series A on 31 March 2026. RTP Global led the round. Seed investors Alven, ISAI and Axeleo took part again, according to Kestra's announcement, IT Brief and CC Startup.
Total funding stands at $36m, IT Brief and CC Startup reported. CC Startup said the earlier funding was a $3m pre-seed in 2023 and an $8m seed in September 2024. No valuation was disclosed.
“The bottleneck is never the model.”Emmanuel Darras, CEO and Co-founder, Kestra
What Kestra does
Kestra describes its product as a declarative, extensible, event-driven orchestration platform for data, infrastructure, business processes and AI, with more than 1,200 plugins. CC Startup said it uses a YAML-based approach, which it contrasted with the Python-centred Apache Airflow, and that it supports hybrid and air-gapped environments.
Emmanuel Darras, co-founder and chief executive, wrote in the announcement that the bottleneck is never the model. The company argues that enterprises have accumulated too much automation in too many places, without a unifying layer above it.
Customers and traction
The company says more than 30,000 organisations use Kestra, and that it ran more than 2 billion workflows in 2025, up from 100 million in 2024. IT Brief added that enterprise revenue rose 25-fold since the seed round. These are company-reported figures.
Kestra's announcement named JPMorgan Chase, which uses it for cybersecurity pipelines, Apple, where hundreds of AI engineers use it, and Amdocs. IT Brief and CC Startup also listed Toyota, Deutsche Telekom, BHP and Crédit Agricole. At BHP, provisioning time reportedly fell from six months to six days after Kestra replaced a VMware vRA environment.
Founders
Kestra was founded in 2021 by Darras and Ludovic Dehon, who is chief technology officer, according to IT Brief and CC Startup. Neither they nor Kestra's own announcement gave a headcount, though the company said it is hiring in the United States, Europe and Asia-Pacific.
Thomas Cuvelier, a partner at RTP Global, said that as workflows become more distributed and AI-native, legacy schedulers and fragmented tooling cannot keep up.
What the money is for
IT Brief said the funds will pay for the release of Kestra 2.0, the rollout of Kestra Cloud and commercial expansion in North America and Europe. CC Startup described Kestra 2.0 as having a new distributed execution engine, real-time observability and native agentic orchestration, including workflow definition in natural language that stays version-controlled and auditable.
Kestra Cloud is described as a fully managed, usage-based service. Kestra's announcement listed Kestra 2.0 as coming soon and said Kestra Cloud was being architected at the time of writing.
Darras also wrote in the announcement that coordination is infrastructure, not a feature that can be bolted on, and that the future is coordinated. The company said the round lets it move faster on what it has already been building.
Company website: kestra.io