Defer

How would you best describe your company/business in a few words?

Defer is an orchestration platform enabling developers to easily write workflows and application automation. Think of Temporal as a self-serve product.

Can you briefly introduce the team?

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Charly, co-founder and CEO, previously Tech-lead at Algolia, where he built a solution similar to Defer that contributed to $6M new ARR.

Bryan, co-founder, and CTO, previously led the infrastructure and back-end at JobTeaser, a job board platform for millions of students across Europe.

Emile, our Founding Engineer, graduated from Centrale Lille and joined Javelo from its creation to their acquisition by Tellent 6 years later.

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Can you elaborate on what you do?‍

At its core, Defer is an orchestration engine similar to Apache Pulsar, an enterprise-grade orchestration software to power data workflows at scale.

As a platform, developers use Defer to build workflows, such as financial transaction categorization with Large Language Models or automation like sending reminders or performing recurring technical tasks (eg: Algolia indexing).

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Why does your solution matter? And why today?

Building and operating workflows requires a comprehensive set of tools at many levels: frameworks for writing the workflows, an orchestrator to execute them, infrastructure on which to run the code, and dashboarding tools to operate them.

Combining all those tools requires different sets of technical expertise and time investment that slows down small companies’ time-to-market and larger companies’ ability to innovate, as we can see with the rise of LLM use cases that rely on workflows.

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In the past years, infrastructure has moved closer to the developers with solutions like Heroku, removing the absolute need for a DevOps Engineer.

This market evolution, combined with the increased need for orchestration brought by LLM applications, is a perfect fit for our mission of helping developers and companies build and scale workflows.‍

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Can you tell me where the idea came from?‍

Past experiences dealing with asynchronous systems in multiple companies and a challenge around orchestration at Algolia led to the idea of the Defer platform that fits the current category of PaaS products in the Node.js market (eg: Supabase, Vercel).

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