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The Kestra Story
It started as one of these deals that you only find by looking deep into the open-source ecosystem. In 2023, Emmanuel Darras and Ludovic Dehon had been working for months on a side project: a new approach to data orchestration, declarative, YAML-based, designed as a real alternative to Apache Airflow. The GitHub repository was quietly gaining traction — hundreds of stars from data engineers tired of stitching Python DAGs together. No press, no buzz. Just developers using their code.
For us, the signal was unmistakable.
“Conviction on Kestra built progressively, through technical conversations with the founders. Emmanuel and Ludovic had a precise reading of what was broken in enterprise orchestration, and a fully formed architectural answer. The depth of those exchanges, combined with their engineering and entrepreneurial backgrounds, was enough to gauge the seriousness of the project.”
The founders' profile reinforced the conviction — and the complementarity between them. Emmanuel had previously co-founded Ankama, the gaming studio behind Dofus. He brought the operator mindset: tempo, casting, the ability to turn a technical project into a company. Ludovic brought 15+ years of software engineering depth and the architectural vision behind Kestra — the technical hand on the product, from day one. Two technical co-founders, complementary in their roles, sharing the patience that open-source businesses require.
In October 2023, Axeleo Capital co-led Kestra's $3M seed round alongside ISAI, with an exceptional syndicate of angels: Olivier Pomel (Datadog), Stan Christians (Collibra), Pierre Burgy (Strapi), Olivier Bonnet (BlaBlaCar). The bet was clear: orchestration was about to become a category of its own, and Kestra had the right architecture and the right team to define it.
From Seed to Global Reach
In September 2024, Kestra raised an $8M seed extension led by Alven, with continued participation from ISAI and Axeleo Capital. The investor lineup tightened around tier-1 angels — Olivier Pomel again, Tristan Handy (dbt Labs), Michel Tricot (Airbyte), Clément Delangue (Hugging Face) — confirming that Kestra was building infrastructure that the modern data stack itself recognized as critical.
Then, in March 2026, came the inflection: a $25M Series A led by RTP Global, with Alven, ISAI, and Axeleo Capital following on.
The growth numbers behind the round are striking. Since the seed extension 18 months earlier, Kestra had grown enterprise revenue 25×, executed over 2 billion workflows in 2025 (up 20× year-over-year from 100 million in 2024), and now counts more than 30,000 organizations worldwide using the platform, with 26,000+ GitHub stars and 1,200+ plugins.
The enterprise roster speaks for itself: Apple (AI pipelines across the App Store, Apple Music, and device diagnostics), JPMorgan Chase (cybersecurity pipelines), Toyota (unified AI and data pipeline monitoring), Deutsche Telekom, BHP, Crédit Agricole, Bloomberg, L'Oréal, Acxiom, Xiaomi.
Why This Deal Matters
Kestra captures the type of opportunity Axeleo specializes in: deep technical founders, an emerging category, and the patience to back a B2B infrastructure business in a market that hype cycles ignored.
“This was open-source, deeply technical, B2B infrastructure. Not the sexy market everyone wanted to chase in 2023. But the orchestration crisis was already visible inside large enterprises — data, AI, infrastructure, business processes all running on fragmented schedulers no one fully owned. Kestra was the answer, and Emmanuel and Ludovic were the right people to build it.”
— Eric Burdier
Looking back at three years of working alongside the duo, Eric adds a more personal note:
“When I first met Emmanuel, he was a man of many questions — sharp, relentless, searching. With this milestone, he clearly holds part of the answer. He drives Kestra the way a director drives a blockbuster: mastering the tempo and the casting, making sure every team member has a defining role. In perfect counterpoint, Ludovic is the guitar hero — the riffs, the vision, and a technical execution that turns complexity into a melody.”
The market itself has now caught up with the thesis. The global AI orchestration market is expected to reach $30.2B by 2030 (from $11.0B in 2025), a 22.3% CAGR. Kestra is positioned at the center of that wave — and with Series A capital secured, the company is launching Kestra 2.0 and expanding go-to-market across North America and Europe.
Stay tuned.