"DBOS gave us the durable execution model we needed without turning deployment into a distributed systems project. It is just backed by Postgres, which makes it much easier to embed into our product and run inside customer environments.”
— Hemang Rajvanshy, Co-founder and CTO at FlowGen Labs

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About FlowGen: the Agentic ERP

‍FlowGen Labs is building the zero-touch enterprise by transforming the ERP from a system of record into an autonomous execution layer. Grounded in each customer’s ontology, live operational data, and operating procedures, this layer enables complex finance, supply chain, logistics, and manufacturing workflows to run at machine speed. FlowGen Labs has been deployed at Fortune 500 companies across CPG, distribution, high tech, and oil and gas.

Following a comparison against Temporal, FlowGen selected DBOS to provide the durable execution and observability needed to scale their production deployments without ballooning their operational overhead.

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Challenge: Durability in Locked-Down Environments

With a lean technical team, FlowGen faced a challenge common to high-stakes enterprise software: delivering sophisticated, long-lived workflows within the rigid security constraints of "Bring Your Own Cloud" (BYOC) and air-gapped customer environments. FlowGen operates inside enterprises’ most sensitive financial and operational systems, so deployment flexibility and data control are essential.

As FlowGen began scaling from its first few deployments to a broader rollout, several critical hurdles emerged:

• The "Black Box" Problem: Debugging failed workflows in a customer’s private environment is notoriously difficult without exposing sensitive PII or financial data.
• Strict Security Requirements: Most customers prohibit inbound connections, requiring any monitoring solution to be purely egress-only or entirely self-hosted.
• Long-Lived State: many workflows are built around human-in-the-loop approval, often waiting days for manual inputs, requiring a system that can maintain state durably without the risk of data loss during restarts.

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Solution: DBOS Durable Execution

Flowgen integrated the DBOS Transact library to power its core application logic, ensuring that every step of their agentic workflows is durably recorded in Postgres. To solve the observability gap, they leverage DBOS Conductor.

Privacy-first Monitoring via Egress-only WebSockets

DBOS Conductor solves the connectivity hurdle by using an outbound WebSocket connection from the app workers to the Conductor dashboard. This allows Flowgen to monitor workflow health and manage retries without requiring the customer to open inbound firewall ports. Crucially, Conductor is designed to be privacy-preserving: it can be configured with metadata-only mode to display only workflow metadata - timing, status and error counts - without sensitive data ever leaving the environment.

Built for the Air-Gapped Enterprise

For customers with the strictest security mandates, DBOS provides a self-hosted Conductor binary. This allows FlowGen to package the entire observability suite as part of an on-premise installation, ensuring that no data ever leaves the customer’s controlled environment while still providing the team with the admin tools they need to maintain the system.

Scaling a Lean Engineering Team

By leveraging DBOS, Flowgen’s lean engineering team avoids the "infrastructure tax" of building custom monitoring wrappers or complex retry logic.

• Automated Recovery: If a worker goes down, DBOS automatically resumes workflows from the last successful step.
• Centralized Administration: Conductor acts as a single pane of glass for managing versions and retrying failed steps across multiple customer deployments.

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The DBOS Advantage for Flowgen

Implementing DBOS simplified backend development at Flowgen, resulting in the following advantages:

• ‍Durable execution - Ensures long-lived ERP workflows never lose state, even during multi-day pauses.‍
• Architectural simplicity - A simple stack built around Postgres is easy for security teams to review and approve. ‍
• Fully self-hostable - Enables full observability even in completely air-gapped, high-security environments.‍
• TypeScript-native - Allows the team to quickly write reliable AI workflows with one-line primitives for checkpointing, queueing, scheduling and workflow management.

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Looking Ahead: A Partnership for Scale

As FlowGen moves toward managing thousands of concurrent workflows per customer, the partnership with DBOS provides a clear path to scale. With DBOS handling the "plumbing" of state management and distributed recovery, FlowGen can remain focused on what they do best: building the next generation Agentic ERP. 

By moving away from ad-hoc monitoring to the structured, durable environment provided by DBOS, FlowGen is proving that even a lean startup can meet the rigorous demands of the world's largest enterprise users.

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