Bellevue, Wash.-based Temporal is enhancing its security features for AI agents after securing a $550 million funding round last month, which valued the enterprise infrastructure provider at $12.55 billion. On Tuesday, the company announced that Oso’s team members, a New York-based startup focused on application authorization, have joined Temporal to embed access controls into its platform. Concurrently, holding company Tiny has purchased Oso’s software and its customer base. This initiative tackles an escalating issue facing enterprise technology teams: while generative AI models manage reasoning, autonomous agents must interface with internal databases, execute multi-step workflows, and invoke external APIs while maintaining security.
“AI safety doesn’t stop at the model,” Temporal’s VP of product Preeti Somal stated in the release. Temporal’s core technology, labeled “durable execution,” preserves application state and execution history across failures and timeouts. Integrating Oso’s security frameworks into this engine aims to ensure an agent’s permissions and human approvals remain consistent, stopping agents from bypassing controls or repeating denied actions.
“Our goal is practical: to help developers put agents to work with appropriate access and with guardrails their companies control,” Somal explained. In practice, this means requiring, for every agent action, identification of the acting party and their permitted operations, and receiving the same response each time the task is retried.
“What makes agents valuable is the same thing that makes them dangerous, access to real systems and data,” Oso founder Graham Neray said in a press release. Temporal already supports agents in applications like Cursor and OpenAI Codex, and the company believes proper security controls are key to unlocking their full potential. Joining Temporal will accelerate its efforts on agent authorization, providing developers more exacting control over agent access and actions.
Founded in 2019 by Amazon and Microsoft alumni Samar Abbas and Maxim Fateev, Temporal offers open-source orchestration tools utilized by firms such as OpenAI, NVIDIA, Netflix, Snap, and JPMorgan Chase. The company recently exceeded $250 million in annualized revenue, growing over 200% year-over-year. Before the Oso acquisition, Temporal had around 570 employees, roughly double from a year prior, with 89 based in Seattle. The fully remote company uses its Bellevue office, formerly occupied by OpenAI, for meetings rather than daily work. The startup recently climbed to the top position on the GeekWire 200 list of fast-growing Pacific Northwest tech startups.