Building the Stack Underneath Everything
The alert fired at 3am. Not JJ's alert - some engineer at a major bank, staring at a screen that tells them microservices are misbehaving in ways the old tools can't explain. This is the problem Jeyappragash Jeyakeerthi - everyone calls him JJ - set out to solve in 2018, and the reason Tetrate exists. Service mesh is unglamorous infrastructure. It's the plumbing. JJ bet his career that the plumbing was what mattered most.
Before Tetrate, JJ ran Twitter's Cloud Infrastructure Management Platform. That sentence is easy to type and hard to appreciate. Twitter's infrastructure in its peak era was one of the most demanding distributed systems environments outside the major cloud providers - a place where "the load changed by an order of magnitude during a World Cup goal" was a real engineering constraint, not a hypothetical. JJ wasn't running marketing analytics. He was running the thing that kept everything else running.
Before Twitter, there was Motorola - building notification infrastructure, software upgrade services, and a prospective search-based content delivery system. This isn't a career path that goes from success to success in the conventional sense. It's the kind of path that accumulates very specific knowledge about how large-scale systems actually fail, and what it costs when they do.
"We knew from the start that enterprise-sized customers needed what we were building. What we didn't know - we're very technical founders, right? - is how to navigate selling to them."- Jeyappragash JJ, on founding Tetrate
JJ holds an M.Tech in Electrical Engineering from IIT Madras - one of India's most selective institutions, where the entrance exam rejection rate exceeds 99%. The EE background is revealing. Networking, at its core, is electrical engineering abstracted into software. JJ thinks in signals, latency, and packet loss, even when the packets are HTTP requests between Kubernetes pods.
The founding of Tetrate in 2018 brought together two complementary views of the same problem. Varun Talwar had co-created Istio at Google - the open-source service mesh that would underpin cloud-native networking. JJ had run the infrastructure where such technology needed to actually work under production pressure. Varun knew what Istio could be. JJ knew what production infrastructure demanded. The gap between those two things was Tetrate's market.
Zero Trust, Made Real
The phrase "zero trust" has been diluted by marketing into near-meaninglessness. JJ and the Tetrate team mean something specific by it: every service-to-service connection in a distributed system should be authenticated, authorized, and encrypted by default - regardless of where it lives, whether that's a Kubernetes cluster in AWS, an on-premise data center, or an edge device in an aircraft. That last one is not hypothetical. The US Air Force is a Tetrate customer.
Getting there required solving Istio's enterprise-readiness problem. Istio was built by Google engineers for Google-scale environments. It was powerful and complex, and making it production-ready across heterogeneous multi-cloud deployments required significant additional engineering. Tetrate built that wrapper - and then kept building, contributing back to Istio, Envoy, and SkyWalking as top-tier open-source contributors. The team JJ assembled includes the actual founders and primary maintainers of these projects. This is not a company built on top of open source. This is a company built out of it.
"We at Tetrate are very proud to have created the first FIPS-verified build for Istio. This is a goal we have had our eyes on since founding Tetrate in 2018."- Jeyappragash JJ, on achieving FIPS 140-2 certification
The FIPS certification story is worth sitting with. FIPS 140-2 is the Federal Information Processing Standard - the cryptographic validation required for software used in US government systems. Nobody had done it for Istio. JJ set it as a goal on the day Tetrate was founded. Four years later, in 2022, Tetrate became the first company to achieve it. The FIPS-verified Tetrate Istio Distro was added to the US Government's Iron Bank repository - a curated set of vetted container images approved for federal use. The US Air Force deployed zero-trust architecture using Tetrate's service mesh.
Edge security was another frontier JJ addressed early. In 2019, when the conversation in cloud-native circles was still overwhelmingly focused on Kubernetes clusters in the cloud, JJ was thinking about edge devices - systems that are physically remote, intermittently connected, and inherently more exposed. "Edge is always compromised on security posture, so providing tight offline security is critical," he said. The observation seems obvious now. It wasn't, then.
Technical Founders Learning to Sell
One of the more honest things JJ has said publicly is about what he and Varun didn't know when they founded Tetrate. They knew the technology cold. They didn't know enterprise sales. This is a common story in technical founding teams, but JJ articulates it with unusual clarity rather than retroactively pretending it was all planned. The early investor relationships - particularly with Dell Technologies Capital - were partly about filling that gap. "Who knows enterprise better than Dell?" JJ noted, explaining why the DTC association carried credibility disproportionate to the check size.
Tetrate raised $40 million in a Series B led by Sapphire Ventures in March 2021, bringing total funding to $52.5 million. The company grew from 20 employees to 40 within two years of founding, and has since scaled to over 110 people. Forbes named Tetrate one of "America's Best Startup Employers" for two consecutive years - a signal that the internal culture JJ and Varun built took hold even as the company scaled rapidly.
The annual NIST|Tetrate Conference on Zero Trust Architecture, launched in 2020 and co-hosted with the National Institute of Standards and Technology, reflects JJ's approach to market positioning. Instead of competing on marketing spend, Tetrate established itself as a technical authority by collaborating with NIST on the standards themselves. Tetrate contributed to NIST Special Publications SP 800-204A and SP 800-204B - the authoritative guidance documents on service mesh security. You don't need a sales team when you wrote the book the procurement officer's compliance checklist references.
"When you're just starting out, you don't know how involved you want your investors to be. You look for a good match on the personality side and then hope they will not be detrimental to the business."- Jeyappragash JJ, on early-stage fundraising
The most recent frontier is AI infrastructure. As enterprises began deploying large language models in production environments, the same problems JJ had solved for microservices reappeared: routing, load balancing, security, observability, cost control. Tetrate's Envoy AI Gateway project - growing from v0.1 to v0.4 with an expanding community - applies the same service mesh principles to AI traffic. Token forecasting, model routing, cost governance, compliance reporting: the vocabulary changes, but the underlying engineering problems are JJ's home territory.