Buf Technologies

Buf Technologies Inc. develops software tooling for API development based on protocol buffers (Protobuf), the schema and serialization technology originally developed as open source by Google. The company's stated aim is to make it easier for machines and software programs to communicate by replacing the labour-intensive work engineering teams do when adapting open-source Protobuf tooling for their own use. Founder Peter Edge described this maintenance work as having consumed roughly 20 per cent of his engineering time in a prior role, and framed the product as a way to return engineering time to companies.

The company's approach is "schema driven" development, which its head of business development, Ahron Seeman, compared to Lego bricks: defined interfaces between components allow parts of a system to be built independently because their connection points are known in advance. Buf's position is that large technology companies such as Google and Facebook have long worked this way internally, while most other organizations rely on less advanced open-source tooling.

As of December 2021, Buf had 18 employees and no revenue. It was founded and built in Toronto by Edge, an American software engineer who previously worked at Uber Technologies in that city; Buffalo, New York — Edge's hometown and the source of the company name, alongside the Protobuf reference — is described in reporting as technically the company's headquarters. Edge studied computer science and mathematics at Carnegie Mellon University and recruited at least six former Uber colleagues; other employees previously worked at Stripe, GitHub, Cisco and Autodesk.

Founding story

Peter Edge, an American software engineer, founded Buf in Toronto after leaving a job at Uber Technologies in that city, having experienced firsthand the effort required to make open-source Protobuf tooling usable for engineering teams. He named the company both after his hometown of Buffalo — which is technically the company's headquarters — and after protocol buffers, the area of software development the company addresses. An investor, Garage Capital managing partner Mike McCauley, said the team could have built the company anywhere but chose Toronto as the best place to attract global talent.

Business model

Buf follows an open-source developer tooling model: it distributes the Buf CLI free of charge to build a user base, and monetizes through a paid product, the Buf Schema Registry. Reporting compares the strategy to that used by Grafana Labs, Confluent, Elastic and HashiCorp, where free tooling is complemented by paid versions offering additional support and features.

Paid commercial product (Buf Schema Registry) layered on top of freely distributed open-source tooling. As of December 2021 the company had generated no revenue, with several early customers in testing; management said it expected first revenue soon but that meaningful revenue was not a primary 2022 target.

Traction

As of December 2021: 18 employees, no revenue, more than one million downloads of the Buf CLI, and several unnamed large enterprise customers testing the Buf Schema Registry. The company planned to grow to about 100 employees in 2022.

Latest developments

In December 2021 Buf disclosed US$93.4-million raised across four financings, including a US$68-million round co-led by Lux Capital and Tiger Global in November 2021. Development priorities were the paid Buf Schema Registry, accelerating engineering and expanding the user base, with hiring targeted at roughly 100 people during 2022.