Today, Temporal was named to the inaugural 2026 AI 100, the definitive ranking of the top 100 private AI companies in the world, published by Newcomer in collaboration with Bessemer Venture Partners. We came in at No. 34, and we’re proud of what this recognition reflects: our unwavering commitment to reliability.
The thing about reliability is that, when it’s at its best, it gets virtually no recognition because when it works, nobody ever sees the failure. So it feels really special to have that work noticed, let alone awarded, and even more special to share it with the people who made it possible.
Where AI tends to break#
While reliability may fly under the radar, what’s easy to identify are the same patterns across companies building with AI right now. Of course, the work that matters most in a system tends to be the work that takes the longest, but unfortunately, that’s also where things are falling apart. Take an onboarding flow that stalls waiting on an approval, or imagine a payment that’s stuck waiting for a bank to confirm.
By now, we all know agents raise the stakes. An agent might run for weeks on end and depend on dozens of systems throughout that process, so it becomes crucial for agents to pick up where they left off when one of them goes down.
Why we built Temporal#
We built Temporal for this reason. Reliability is, and has always been, the backbone of the work we do. Both myself and Preeti started out our careers as engineers, so we understand the difficulties you face. We know how much it matters to be able to write your work, with whatever languages and whatever models the job requires. Temporal runs that work across systems for as long as it takes, keeps its state and full execution history, and resumes from the last completed step after a failure. We minted this as “Durable Execution.”
Keeping up as AI changes#
We know that most teams are building with AI, and you’re probably changing your mind about the processes surrounding this often. This is healthy because models and frameworks turn over every few months. Temporal works with the OpenAI SDK, the Pydantic SDK, and others, so a team can swap one without touching the layer underneath. We do this because we want people to move quickly on the things that should change and not worry about the part that shouldn’t.
The main benefit to developers is the time you’re able to get back. Retry and recovery code is some of the hardest to get right, and Durable Execution takes it off your plate so you can spend your hours on your own logic. We think of it as an investment in how quickly and how confidently a team can ship.
Where Temporal fits#
That’s also how agents make it out of the pilot stage and keep delivering value after launch. Wherever your company is, Temporal meets you there: AI-native companies turn demos into products their customers trust, while digital-native companies and established enterprises add agents to what they already run without starting over. The same platform runs payments and fulfillment alongside some of the most capable agents in production, and major banks and financial institutions rely on it for critical workflows where trust can’t drop.
A sincere thank you#
Our engineering team, which Preeti leads, has spent much of the past year on what changes when agentic applications get big, including large payload storage and protections for downstream systems and GPU costs. Their work is a large part of why this recognition is possible.
Thank you so much to all our customers for trusting us with their work that can’t fail, and to the developers who keep pushing the boundaries of what Durable Execution can do. Thank you to everyone at Temporal for building this with care, and to Newcomer and Bessemer Venture Partners for including us.
We’ll leave you with this last note: We have so many exciting things left to build, and we’re hiring! If you’d like to work on it with us, you can see open roles here.