Orchestra, the London data infrastructure startup founded by Hugo Lu and Will Davies, has raised £2.4M ($3.3M) in a seed round led by Differential Ventures.
AI has made every part of a business hungrier for data, but the pipelines that move and prepare it are still fragile and expensive to run. Data teams field requests from across the company, fix broken jobs overnight and stitch together tools that were never designed to work alongside AI agents. Rather than speeding up AI adoption, they become the queue everyone else waits in.
Orchestra sits on top of the tools a company already runs, with more than 100 integrations, and turns them into a single place to build, schedule and monitor data workflows. Engineers work through an interface or in a few lines of code, and each workflow exposes the dependencies behind it. A serverless engine runs tasks and agents in parallel, so customers do not have to maintain their own clusters. Its newer product, Orchestra Runtime, gives every AI agent an isolated environment with access only to the resources its job requires, while a Context Layer feeds agents what they need to know about the company's systems. Teams use it to build pipelines, investigate production incidents and triage failures automatically, with whichever models they prefer.
Founded in 2023, Orchestra says platform usage grew more than tenfold over the past year. Customers include Experian, the San Francisco Giants, Campfire and Trust & Will, and Octopus Energy is moving its dbt workloads from Airflow onto the platform. The company says customers have cut pipeline runtime costs by up to 80% and that it automates hundreds of failure investigations every day. Lu previously ran the data team at fintech Codat, and Davies led product engineering at a video AI infrastructure startup. The round takes total funding to $4.6M, following a $1.3M pre-seed led by Moonfire.
Moonfire returned for the seed, alongside Breakers, Tokyo Black and Contour Venture Partners. Orchestra will use the money to grow its engineering and go-to-market teams in London, push product development and expand in the US and Europe. Nick Adams, managing partner at Differential Ventures, said reliable pipeline management is one of the biggest obstacles to getting AI systems into production.
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