Loophole Labs
Founded 2019 Β· 8 employees on LinkedIn Β· 5 known investors
Loophole Labs is a systems infrastructure company that builds Architect, a Kubernetes platform for pod hibernation and live migration of workloads across nodes, zones, and clouds to avoid spot instance preemption and cold starts. It also offers AGX, an agent sandbox platform for running untrusted code on an in-house hypervisor, serving engineering and infrastructure teams.
Also known as Loophole Labs, Inc.
Founders & leadership
Investors Β· 5
Company profile
researched Aug 2026Loophole Labs is a systems infrastructure company founded in 2021 that builds low-level primitives for Kubernetes and AI agent workloads. Its main product, Loophole Labs Architect (architect.io), is described as a Kubernetes availability platform that live-migrates running workloads across nodes, availability zones and clouds before spot instances are reclaimed, with zero downtime and no application code changes, and that hibernates idle pods so they wake in under 50ms without cold starts. A second product, AGX (agx.so), is an agent sandbox platform for running untrusted code and integrating with third-party systems on an in-house hypervisor.
The company's engineering work spans live migration, cold-start elimination, and making spot instances and GPUs usable as first-class compute resources. Published engineering write-ups cover moving a running Valkey container off a reclaimed EKS spot instance with in-memory state intact, scaling Kubernetes pods to zero without cold starts, live migration of stateful Kubernetes workloads between AWS, Azure, GCP and bare metal, intercepting CUDA calls at the loader level to run LLMs in containers with no local GPU, using XDP for egress traffic, and a rewrite of CRIU in Zig.
Loophole Labs also maintains a body of open-source projects on GitHub, including Scale (a WebAssembly-powered plugin framework), fRPC/frisbee-go (a bring-your-own-protocol messaging and RPC framework for Go), Polyglot (a cross-language serialization framework), Drafter (a compute primitive designed for live migration), and Linux kernel CI with PVM patches. Earlier public descriptions of the company positioned it as a modern application delivery platform built around open-source developer primitives for WASM and networking.
Founding story
Founder and CEO Shivansh Vij is a long-time open-source developer who began his infrastructure and cloud-native work in 2018 at IBM on container and Kubernetes platforms and was involved in the early days of service meshes; he founded Loophole Labs in 2021 with the stated goal of fixing core infrastructure problems such as cold-start latency and spot instance preemption by rethinking them from first principles.
Business model
Loophole Labs sells infrastructure software products β Architect for Kubernetes availability, hibernation and live migration, and AGX for sandboxed execution of untrusted agent code β alongside a portfolio of open-source projects that serve as developer-facing primitives.
Traction
Architect is presented with claims of 75%+ cost savings when running Kubernetes workloads on spot instances and pod wake times under 50ms; a third-party profile cites claimed Kubernetes cost reductions of 30-50%. Open-source repositories include Scale (~634 GitHub stars), fRPC-go (~462), Drafter (~161), frisbee-go (~76) and Polyglot (~57), across 67 public repositories. The founder has spoken publicly, including at FOSDEM 2024 and on the OSS Startup Podcast (July 2023).
Latest developments
In 2026 the company published product and engineering updates on scaling Kubernetes pods to zero without cold starts (June 2026), migrating a running Valkey container with intact in-memory data off a reclaimed EKS spot instance (June 2026), rewriting CRIU in Zig (May 2026), and running LLMs in containers without local GPU access by forwarding CUDA calls to a remote DGX Spark (May 2026). The AGX agent sandbox platform is listed alongside Architect as a current product.
βΈFull profile β market position, technology, go-to-market, geography, history, risks & controversies
Market position
The company positions itself in cloud-native infrastructure, targeting Kubernetes-heavy workloads and addressing workload portability, cold starts and spot instance preemption; third-party profiling places it in software development / cloud infrastructure with a small team and venture backing.
The company frames its differentiation as solving problems the industry designs around β eliminating cold-start latency and spot instance preemption rather than mitigating them β by live-migrating running workloads (including stateful ones) across clouds with no application code changes and by treating spot instances and GPUs as first-class compute.
Technology
Architect continuously handles running Kubernetes pods so they can be hibernated and resumed in under 50ms and live-migrated across nodes, zones and clouds without downtime or code changes, including stateful workloads with in-memory data. AGX runs untrusted code on an in-house high-performance hypervisor. Supporting technical work includes a Zig rewrite of CRIU (checkpoint/restore), loader-level interception and remote forwarding of CUDA calls to run GPU workloads from GPU-less containers, use of eBPF/XDP for egress packet processing at line rate, Linux kernel builds with PVM patches, and open-source frameworks in Go, C, Rust and WebAssembly (Scale, frisbee-go, fRPC, Polyglot, Drafter).
Go-to-market
The company reaches developers and infrastructure engineers through open-source projects, a technical blog and newsletter, a Discord community, conference talks and podcast appearances, with commercial products surfaced on dedicated sites (architect.io and agx.so).
Engineering, platform and infrastructure teams running Kubernetes workloads, including those using spot instances and GPUs, and teams needing sandboxed execution for AI agents and untrusted code.
Geography
A third-party business database lists the company in New York, United States, with staff across North America and Europe.
History
The company was founded in 2021 by Shivansh (Shiv) Vij, who previously worked on container and Kubernetes platforms at IBM starting in 2018. Its early public identity centred on open-source developer primitives and application delivery, including the WASM-based Scale framework, fRPC, Polyglot and Drafter; by 2023 it was publicly described as a modern application delivery platform. From 2025 onward the company's public output focused on Architect, with announcements on cross-cloud Kubernetes live migration (May 2025), solving spot instance preemption (September 2025) and scaling pods to zero without cold starts (June 2026), plus the AGX agent sandbox platform.
Risks & controversies
Publicly available data on the company is inconsistent: a third-party business database lists a 2019 founding date and cites Haystack as an investor, while the company's own site states a 2021 founding and names Amplify Partners, Cervin Ventures and Peak XV as backers. Several early open-source projects, including Scale and Drafter, are archived on GitHub.
Compiled by commissioned research from 8 cited public sources β announcements, filings, and press listed under research sources below.
Key figures
latest reportedCompany-reported or press-reported figures, each dated to when it was claimed β not independently audited.
Competitors Β· 4
by search overlap
Companies competing with Loophole Labs for the same Google search keywords, organic and paid, via search-intersection analysis.
Timeline Β· 9
launches, deals, and filingsEngineering post reporting that Architect moved a running Valkey container without persistence to another host with in-memory data intact after its EKS spot instance was reclaimed.
Product post describing Architect capability to scale Kubernetes pods to zero while eliminating cold starts.
Engineering post describing running large language models inside a container with no local GPU or CUDA drivers by intercepting CUDA calls at the loader level and forwarding them to a remote DGX Spark.
Engineering post on achieving line-rate packet processing for outbound traffic with XDP and no kernel modifications by exploiting Linux handling of virtual network interfaces.
Announcement post stating Architect enables any Kubernetes workload to run on spot instances with zero downtime and 75%+ cost savings without code changes, via pod migration during preemption.
Company blog post describing live migration of entire Kubernetes clusters, including stateful workloads, between AWS, Azure, GCP and bare metal with zero downtime.
A news item reports that Loophole Labs, Inc. raised venture funding from Haystack Management Company; no amount was disclosed.
Founder and CEO Shivansh Vij presented 'The JVM vs. WebAssembly: An In-Depth Comparative Analysis' in the Free Java devroom at FOSDEM 2024 in Brussels.
Episode 97 of the OSS Startup Podcast featured Shivansh Vij discussing Loophole Labs' open-source WASM and networking projects and hiring process.
Dated company events from announcements, filings, and press; legal rows summarize public dockets and regulator releases.
In the news
βΈResearch sources Β· 8
primary sources listed
- Loophole Labsloopholelabs.io Β· web
8 public sources were cited for this profile; the first-party ones are listed here.
Frequently asked questions
- What does Loophole Labs do?
- Systems infrastructure company building Architect, a Kubernetes pod hibernation and live-migration platform, and AGX agent sandboxes.
- Who are Loophole Labs's investors?
- Loophole Labs's investors include Amplify Partners CV, Cervin, Deep Acre, Peak XV Partners, Haystack.