rust
(25)
Ellipsis Labs built an exchange. Then it went after the clock.
Phoenix put the order book on-chain. Now Ellipsis Labs is working on the machinery underneath finance - and the milliseconds that decide who gets a fair price.
Deno tried to leave Node behind. Its users brought npm.
The creator of Node.js built Deno to make JavaScript simpler. The revealing part is what his second act learned to keep - and why its next customer might be an AI agent.
Apriorit makes software work where the manual ends
A drone, a closed platform, and no instructions: welcome to Apriorit’s corner of software engineering. Its business is making difficult systems cooperate, from device drivers to private AI.
Futurewei and the business of agreeing
A Huawei affiliate works on the code and conventions that let rival technologies cooperate. Its story reveals both the value of shared infrastructure and the expense of keeping it alive.
SDF Labs and the expensive art of finding out too late
A Seattle compiler startup asked why data developers had to send SQL to the cloud just to discover a mistake. Its answer ended up inside dbt - and changed the machinery beneath analytics engineering.
The observability bill that made less data look like a feature
OpenObserve wants engineers to keep the logs, metrics and traces they need without treating every new byte as a financial emergency. Its wager is a Rust engine, compressed Parquet files and object storage - plus a business built around making that machinery usable.
Parity built the machinery. Now comes the human part.
The engineers behind Polkadot spent a decade making blockchains work together. Their next test is whether people can use the result without needing a blockchain education.
Ockam Spent Years Making Networks Disappear. Then the Company Did Too.
The San Francisco startup raised $17.6 million to turn zero-trust plumbing into a developer primitive. Its sharpest lessons survive in open source - including the costly rewrite that finally made the idea click.
Attune
Attune is a San Francisco developer-tools startup (YC X25) building drop-in build acceleration for engineering teams. Its tool, invoked by prefixing existing commands with 'hurry' (e.g. 'hurry cargo build'), delivers up to 20x faster builds through incremental compilation, remote execution, and distributed caching - with zero migration and no new config language to learn. Attune started with Rust and is expanding to Docker, npm, GitHub Actions, Swift, and Python. It also maintains an open-source project for fast, secure Linux package publishing. Founded by Xin Ding (CEO) and Eliza, who worked together for three years at FOSSA on build systems.
Skillsync
Skillsync is a Y Combinator W26 startup building 'GitHub for agent sessions.' It captures the work of AI coding agents like Claude Code, Codex and Cursor, stores every session in one searchable place, and turns the best sessions into reusable skills any agent on a team can load. Founded by ex-Juspay Rust engineers Narayana Aaditya Ganeshkumar and Nishant Joshi, the company started as a tool for finding elite engineers by their GitHub code and evolved into infrastructure for sharing agent knowledge across teams.
Diode Computers, Inc.
Diode Computers is a New York-based startup building an AI-powered, code-first platform for designing and manufacturing custom printed circuit boards. Its open-source toolchain - a Rust-based PCB compiler that treats schematics as Python-readable code - lets AI agents and engineers generate, validate, and manufacture boards in days rather than months, with human-in-the-loop verification. Founded in 2024 and backed by a $11.4M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, Diode serves hardware teams in aerospace, robotics, and defense.
Materialize
Materialize is a New York-based data infrastructure company that builds a streaming SQL database. It continuously ingests data from operational systems, incrementally maintains the results of complex SQL queries as always-fresh materialized views, and serves them with low latency. Built on the open-source Timely Dataflow and Differential Dataflow engines and written in Rust, Materialize looks and behaves like Postgres, letting engineers use standard SQL to power real-time analytics, automation, personalization, fraud detection, and - more recently - a live context layer for AI agents and applications.
InfluxData
InfluxData is the company behind InfluxDB, the open source time series database purpose-built for high-volume, timestamped data from sensors, applications, infrastructure, and IoT devices. Founded in 2012 and led by CEO Evan Kaplan and founder/CTO Paul Dix, InfluxData rebuilt its engine in Rust on the Apache Arrow, DataFusion, Flight, and Parquet stack for InfluxDB 3. The platform is used by more than 1,900 paying customers - including Tesla, IBM, Cisco, PayPal, and Nordstrom - to collect, store, and analyze real-time data at scale.
LiveKit
LiveKit is an open-source platform and global edge network for building real-time voice, video, and physical AI applications. Born as a WebRTC media server for livestreaming and conferencing, it has grown into the infrastructure layer that lets AI agents see, hear, and speak with sub-100ms latency. Its technology powers ChatGPT's Advanced Voice Mode and is used by developers at OpenAI, xAI, Salesforce, Tesla, and Spotify, collectively facilitating billions of real-time calls each year.
Greptime
Greptime is an open-source database company building GreptimeDB, a unified observability database that stores metrics, logs, traces, and wide events in a single engine on object storage like Amazon S3. Written in Rust and built on Apache Arrow and DataFusion, it separates compute from storage to cut costs at scale and speaks both SQL and PromQL. Founded in 2022 by ex-Alibaba and Ant Group engineers, Greptime positions GreptimeDB as a drop-in replacement for the Prometheus, Loki, and Elasticsearch stack, serving customers across connected vehicles, IoT, and observability.
Oxide Computer Company
Oxide Computer Company builds the Oxide Cloud Computer, a rack-scale system that fuses purpose-built hardware with open-source software to give enterprises the elastic, API-driven experience of a public cloud inside their own data centers. Founded in 2019 by Joyent and Docker veterans, Oxide designs everything from the sheet metal, power distribution, and boot firmware up to the hypervisor and control plane, selling a single integrated rack rather than a pile of parts. It has raised over $577M, counts national labs and Fortune 1000 enterprises among customers, and is known for radical engineering transparency including a uniform company-wide salary.
Scanner
Scanner is a San Francisco cybersecurity company that turns the log data companies already dump into Amazon S3 into a fast, searchable security data lake. Instead of paying traditional SIEM prices to keep only a few weeks of logs, security teams use Scanner to index petabytes of data directly in object storage, run continuous threat detections, and search years of history in seconds - now increasingly driven by AI agents. Founded by ex-Cisco and Dropbox engineers Cliff Crosland and Steven Wu, the company raised a $22M Series A led by Sequoia Capital in March 2026.
Orama
Orama is an open-source search company building an 'answer engine' for developers - a lightweight, high-performance stack that bundles full-text, vector, and hybrid search with automatic embedding generation and built-in LLMs. Started as the open-source project Lyra and incorporated as OramaSearch Inc. in 2023 by Issac Roth and Michele Riva, its core library ships in under 2KB and runs in the browser, on servers, or at the edge. Orama powers site search and AI answers for developer platforms including nodejs.org, tanstack.com, and solidjs.org, and its OramaCore runtime packages a search engine, vector database, and LLM interface into one deployable unit.
Shuttle
Shuttle is a Rust-native cloud platform that lets developers ship backends without writing infrastructure files. You annotate what you need in code - a database, secrets, a web server - and Shuttle provisions it and deploys to the cloud. Founded in 2019 and shaped by Y Combinator's Summer 2020 batch, the company is now repositioning as an 'AI platform engineer' that handles the deployment step where AI coding tools like Cursor, Copilot and Lovable leave off. It has drawn more than 20,000 developers and over 120,000 deployments, and raised a $6M seed round in October 2025.
Succinct
Succinct is a San Francisco cryptography company building SP1, an open-source zero-knowledge virtual machine that lets developers prove the correct execution of any Rust program, and the Succinct Prover Network - a decentralized marketplace where independent provers compete to generate ZK proofs for rollups, bridges and onchain applications.
ParadeDB
ParadeDB is an open-source PostgreSQL extension that brings Elasticsearch-quality full-text search and analytics directly into Postgres, removing the need to copy data into a separate search engine. Built in Rust on the Tantivy library, its pg_search extension delivers BM25-ranked search, faceting, and columnar analytics while preserving Postgres ACID guarantees and avoiding the brittle ETL pipelines that connect Postgres to Elasticsearch. Founded in 2023 by Philippe Noel and Ming Ying and backed by Y Combinator and Craft Ventures, ParadeDB raised a $12M Series A in 2025 and counts Alibaba, Modern Treasury, and Bilt Rewards among its users.
Spiral
Spiral is a New York-based data infrastructure company building a database reimagined from the ground up for the AI era - what it calls the 'Third Age of Data,' when machines, not humans, are the primary consumers of data. Built on Vortex, an open-source columnar file format donated to the Linux Foundation, Spiral streams data directly from object storage into GPU memory, unifies governance across every data type from tiny embeddings to massive video, and aims to keep expensive GPUs saturated instead of idle. Founded by ex-Palantir and ex-Citadel engineers, it emerged from stealth in September 2025 with $22M in Seed and Series A funding led by General Catalyst and Amplify Partners.
LanceDB
LanceDB builds the data backbone for multimodal AI. Its open-source Lance columnar format and lakehouse let teams store, search, and train on text, images, video and embeddings in one system - replacing the brittle stack of Parquet files, vector stores and feature pipelines that AI teams usually stitch together. Used by Midjourney, Runway, Character.AI, WeRide and others, LanceDB raised a $30M Series A in 2025, bringing total funding to roughly $41M.
Mozilla
Mozilla builds Firefox and a family of privacy-first internet products with a single, stubborn goal: keep the web open, private, and not owned by anyone. Spun out of Netscape in 1998 and run by a for-profit corporation wholly owned by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, Mozilla competes with the largest companies on earth while answering to a mission instead of shareholders.
Zelos Cloud
Zelos Cloud is a San Francisco-based B2B data platform for mission-critical systems, founded in 2023 by three former Tesla and Neuralink engineers. The platform unifies data collection, remote command-and-control, real-time visualization, and automated testing for firmware and industrial systems - solving the tooling chaos that plagues teams building hardware that cannot afford to fail. Backed by Y Combinator (S23) and Human Capital, Zelos Cloud is building the operating layer that firmware and embedded systems engineers have always needed but never had.