Tony Holdstock-Brown

Tony Holdstock-Brown is co-founder and CEO of Inngest, a platform for durable, observable backend and AI workflows. With co-founder Dan Farrelly he builds step-function primitives so engineers can write event-driven jobs in their existing codebase without owning queues, retries, and state machines by hand. In 2025 Inngest announced a $21 million Series A led by Altimeter, with continued participation from a16z, Notable, Afore, and Guillermo Rauch.

Healthcare queues to durable steps

On the Scaling DevTools podcast, Holdstock-Brown described how an earlier healthcare company forced him to confront long waits, conditions, and obligations spread across queues and services. Those flows were slow to build and painful to debug. Inngest's answer is to turn those facts into events and durable steps that can wait, resume, and leave an audit trail, which is also why the product shows up in AI agent stacks where model calls are slow and non-deterministic.

Series A for iterative execution

Inngest's Series A post argues that once models are shared, the advantage is how fast teams iterate on reliable products. The company calls its approach iterative execution: durable by default, observable and replayable, asynchronous and event-driven, and abstracted enough that product engineers are not blocked on backend specialists. Public customers and design partners have used Inngest for complex event-driven systems where concurrency, throttling, and recovery matter as much as the model call itself.

On abstractions that help AI coding

Holdstock-Brown has argued that higher-level infrastructure becomes more valuable as coding agents write more of the application. An agent can generate a few Inngest functions with durable steps without first provisioning Redis, workers, and Terraform. In the same podcast he warned that impressive technology is a trap if it does not remove real friction: keep returning to the user's problem. That developer-first durable-execution bet is why he belongs on an early AI-infrastructure watchlist.