Stuart Simmons: VP Sales, EMEA at Temporal Technologies

Company

Temporal Technologies was founded in 2019 by Maxim Fateev and Samar Abbas, who built Uber’s Cadence workflow engine together after careers at Amazon and Microsoft. Temporal is a developer infrastructure platform that allows engineers to write code that keeps running correctly through failures, restarts and long delays, without having to build all the reliability logic themselves. It’s used to orchestrate complex workflows and, increasingly, AI agents that need to run reliably over minutes, hours or days. It is changing how enterprises build reliable software and how they put AI agents into production.

The company has since become one of the fastest-growing developer infrastructure businesses in the world, with more than 2,900 customers, spanning both large enterprises, including JPMorgan Chase and Vodafone, and a growing cohort of AI-native companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic.

Background

In February 2026, Temporal raised $300 million in its Series D, marking a significant milestone in the company’s growth journey. Shortly after the appointment by Erevena, the company announced a further $550 million Series E round at a $12.55 billion valuation. Over the past several years, the team has deployed Temporal across more than 100 large enterprises throughout the region, earning the trust of some of Europe’s most sophisticated engineering organisations and positioning Temporal as the infrastructure platform of choice for leading AI companies. However, many of its largest European customers remain early in their adoption journeys, creating the need for Temporal’s first Head of EMEA. This hire was pivotal to scaling the existing team, setting the regional strategy and commercial plan, increasing revenue, and serving as the senior face of the business across EMEA.

Requirements

Temporal needed someone with genuine fluency in consumption-led commercial models, combined with a strong technical orientation. The successful candidate was never going to be a traditional SaaS leader. The individual also needed to thrive in a fast-paced, hands-on sales environment and have the credibility to engage with Temporal’s core buying personas, particularly CTOs and developers.

Crucially, Temporal was looking for a proven heavyweight – someone with a track record of building EMEA from the ground up and the experience, commercial instinct and leadership capability to do it again. Erevena’s role was to identify and engage this rare calibre of leader, going beyond a conventional SaaS talent pool to find someone who matched both the technical and commercial demands of the brief.

Result

Erevena identified and introduced Stuart Simmons to the Temporal team, and he secured the role. Stuart was most recently Senior Vice President EMEA at Sigma Computing. Before that, he spent just under two years at Lacework, joining as Regional Vice President UK&I and finishing his tenure as Assistant Vice President, Northern Europe. He has a strong background in infrastructure and data scale-ups, and each time with a bigger regional remit than before. Stuart was drawn to Temporal by the chance to join an earlier-stage company and is thrilled to begin his new role in a space that he knows well.