How Kestra Raised $8M: Our Seed Deck, Now Public
Unveiling Our Journey to $8M: Vision, Challenges, and Investor Trust.
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Discover the story behind our $8M seed funding with some CEO/founders of dbt Labs, Datadog, Airbyte, Hugging Face, Algolia, Talend, Platform.sh and some VCs (Alven, ISAI, Axeleo). Learn how we framed our vision, addressed key challenges in orchestration, and built a compelling pitch that secured investor confidence in the future of unified orchestration.
Seeing Michel Tricot and Jean Lafleur from Airbyte openly share their fundraising deck inspired us to do the same. We’re grateful for their transparency and the valuable insights they’ve provided to help startups succeed. (link below)
Today, we’re sharing the deck that helped us raise $8M in seed funding — the decisions we made and the vision that drives Kestra. We want to offer a look into what went into building this story, and why it worked for us.
Framing the Problem: Why Orchestration Matters
We started by asking a fundamental question: Why build a company around orchestration?
Orchestration is the foundation of modern business operations. But it’s often misunderstood. When we talk about orchestration at Kestra, we talk about more than just task management. We’re talking about scalability, reliability, and the ability to automate processes across a diverse ecosystem of tools.
This narrative allowed us to connect the dots between the complexity that businesses face today — fragmented tools, operational silos, and the growing demands of data operations — and how Kestra is uniquely positioned to address these challenges.
The Pain Points We Address
Here we talk about the specific problems we aim to solve. It’s no secret that existing tools are either too rigid or require a high degree of technical knowledge to get started. This results in bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and shadow IT, where non-engineering users default to spreadsheets, GitHub Actions, and no-code automation tools to orchestrate their internal processes — all of which are not visible to the central IT teams.
It was therefore essential for us to explain that Kestra is different. We are not looking to create yet another developer tool that only a small group of experts could use. Instead, Kestra democratizes orchestration. We make it accessible to anyone — whether they’re a software engineer, a data analyst, or a business stakeholder. This accessibility, combined with a powerful yet flexible platform, is what breaks down operational silos and improves efficiency across the board.
Positioning Ourselves in the Market
In the early stages of building Kestra, we noticed the need for a simpler and unified automation platform that can combine workflows as code and low-code automation. Most tools fell into one of two categories — either code-based, requiring significant technical expertise, or UI-based drag-and-drop tools with limited flexibility. Kestra offers both a UI and code-based workflow builder and an Everything as Code approach.
This hybrid approach became one of our most compelling selling points. We are creating something entirely new — a tool that bridges the gap between simplicity and sophistication. In a market full of single-feature products, Kestra is positioned to offer a fully integrated, scalable solution that can grow with businesses.
Our Unique Advantages: More Than Yet Another Automation Tool
We had to show the unique advantages of Kestra. This section of our deck was designed to leave no room for doubt about our value. We focused on three core ideas:
- Ease of Use — Our product is designed for rapid onboarding. Users can create their first workflow in under five minutes!
- API-First Design — Everything at Kestra is built with an API-first mentality, ensuring seamless integration and automation across systems.
- Scalability — Our cloud-native architecture means that Kestra can handle millions of events without a hitch. We knew this scalability was key to global success.
Each point reflected our belief that Kestra wasn’t just a solution for today’s problems but a platform that could evolve with the needs of tomorrow’s businesses. And that’s the heart of what we’re building: a platform with a large ecosystem of plugins and API-first features, not just another orchestration framework.
Building Community and Platform-Led Growth
The most critical aspect of any open-source project is adoption. When we introduced Kestra, we aimed to ensure it wasn’t a top-down tool imposed on engineering teams. Instead, we wanted it to thrive in an open-source environment, where everyone could benefit, contribute, build plugins, and integrate their own systems.
This idea fed directly into our product-led growth strategy. Kestra’s community is one of the key drivers of its growth. It’s about creating a feedback loop where the product gets better as more people use it. It’s a significant advantage over SaaS competitors that operate in closed systems.
Our pitch deck also emphasized our API-first approach, making Kestra extensible and adaptable. We are not just building workflows; we are creating an ecosystem where businesses can plug into and scale their operations, whether they’re orchestrating microservices or managing data pipelines.
What We Don’t Want to Be
We had to be clear about what Kestra was not. We’re not a complex tool that requires weeks of onboarding. We’re not a narrow solution that only works for one persona, like a data engineer. And we certainly don’t want to be an Airflow clone — in fact, we inspire others with Kestra’s key product philosophy “Run anywhere, code in any language.”, and that’s fine!
Our goal was to strike a balance — to provide flexibility without overwhelming users with complexity. We’re not just a dev tool, and we’re not just a UI-based workflow manager. Kestra is designed to meet users where they are, whether they prefer code, focus on UI, or a mix of both.
Closing the Deal
As we wrapped up the deck, it was clear that Kestra wasn’t just addressing a need; it was extending the Data Orchestration category to cover all business operations, not just analytics. We are not another tool fighting for a whitespace in the crowded market. We are building the platform for the future of orchestration that scales to all use cases beyond analytics.
This is a story of accessibility, scalability, and community-led innovation. It’s not about flashy features or overpromising — it’s about delivering a product that users can rely on, grow with, and build upon. That’s the story that secured our $8M seed round. And it’s the story that continues to drive us today.
We are immensely grateful to our investors who believe in our vision and have provided their unwavering support throughout this journey. Check out our full announcement here for more details on what’s next for Kestra and how we plan to continue building.
Help us build the leading platform for Unified Orchestration by starring us on GitHub and joining this exciting journey.
