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Solo
Unicorn · $1BCambridge, US · Founded 2017 · 307 employees on LinkedIn · 6 known investors
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Solo.io provides cloud connectivity solutions that help organizations secure, observe, and control their cloud environments. The company builds enterprise products for cloud-native application networking and service mesh management, serving Fortune 2000 companies and cloud-native organizations globally.
Also known as solo.io · Solo.io · Solo.io, Inc.
Founders & leadership
Solo was founded in 2017 by Idit Levine.
Board
Investors · 6
How we know: the company's own site · board seat on SEC Form D · offering press articles · redpoint.com · open dataset · 5k.vc investor directory · Not right? Tell us
How we know: True Ventures's portfolio page · the company's own site · board seat on SEC Form D · offering press articles · research · solo.io · open dataset · 5k.vc investor directory · Not right? Tell us
How we know: the company's own site · Not right? Tell us
Funding
SEC filings, press & company announcements$166.8M disclosed across 4 of 7 rounds · 2017–2021
- Undisclosed amountSeries COct 2021Source ↗
▶$130MraisedOct 2021 · 5 investors · Other TechnologyRule 506(b)
- Idit LevineExecutive Officer, Director
- Puneet AgarwalDirector
- Satish DharmarajDirector
- Offering amount
- $135M
- Amount sold
- $130M
- First sale
- Oct 2021
- Incorporated
- Corporation, Delaware, 2017
- Federal exemptions
- 06b
▶$23MraisedSep 2020 · 6 investors · OtherRule 506(b)
- Puneet AgarwalDirector
- Satish DharmarajDirector
- Idit LevineExecutive Officer, Director
- Offering amount
- $23M
- Amount sold
- $23M
- First sale
- Aug 2020
- Incorporated
- Corporation, Delaware, 2017
- Federal exemptions
- 06b
▶$11.3MraisedSep 2018 · 6 investors · Other TechnologyRule 506(b)
- Puneet AgarwalDirector
- Satish DharmarajDirector
- Idit LevineExecutive Officer, Director
- Offering amount
- $11.3M
- Amount sold
- $11.3M
- Proceeds to insiders
- $1M
- First sale
- Aug 2018
- Incorporated
- Corporation, Delaware, 2017
- Federal exemptions
- 06b
▶$2.5MraisedSep 2017 · 1 investors · Other TechnologyRule 506(b)
- Idit LevineExecutive Officer, Director
- Offering amount
- $3M
- Amount sold
- $2.5M
- Proceeds to insiders
- $250K
- First sale
- Sep 2017
- Incorporated
- Corporation, Delaware, 2017
- Federal exemptions
- 06b
Source: SEC EDGAR Form D. Amounts as filed; amended filings shown once at their latest values.
Valuation · disclosed
Disclosed eventsSource: SEC prospectus filings, and round valuations the company or its investors disclosed — follow each entry's link for the claim.
Company profile
researched Aug 2026Solo.io, Inc. develops cloud connectivity and application networking software for Kubernetes and cloud environments, and more recently for AI and agentic workloads. Its stated mission is to help customers secure, observe and control everything in their cloud environment. The company's products are commercial enterprise distributions built on open source projects: Solo Enterprise for kgateway (a cloud-native API and AI gateway), Solo Enterprise for Istio (service mesh), Solo Enterprise for agentgateway (a gateway for AI applications) and Solo Enterprise for kagent.
All Solo.io products are built on open source technologies including Istio, Envoy, Kubernetes, Backstage, SPIFFE, SPIRE, OpenTelemetry, OpenAPI, WebAssembly and Linux. The company positions itself as a co-creator of Istio and Ambient Mesh, holds seats on the Istio Steering and Technical Oversight Committees, and maintains or sponsors projects including kgateway, kagent, agentgateway and agentregistry. Its GitHub organization hosts 236 public repositories, including earlier projects such as unik (unikernel and MicroVM compilation and deployment), squash (microservices debugger), bumblebee (eBPF tooling), sqoop (a GraphQL engine powered by Gloo) and wasm tooling.
More recent engineering work centers on agentic AI infrastructure: routing to multiple LLM providers, Model Context Protocol (MCP) server security and management, virtual MCP for reducing token consumption, agent identity, and integrating agentgateway into the Istio ambient mesh as waypoint, ingress and egress proxy. Recent Solo Enterprise for Istio releases (1.29 and 1.30) added AWS ECS integration GA, global service aliasing, ztunnel-native egress controls, a revamped UI with a service graph, and fine-grained workload identity.
Founding story
Solo was founded by Idit Levine, who had worked on cloud technologies for more than ten years and previously served as CTO for the cloud management division of Dell EMC, where she developed UniK, an open source unikernel compilation and deployment platform, and project layer-x, an open source cross-cluster scheduling framework. The founding team included engineers who had previously worked at DynamicOps, VMware and Dell EMC. The company operated in stealth mode at the time of its seed announcement, having already released Squash, an open source microservices debugging platform.
Business model
Solo.io builds open source cloud-native networking projects and sells commercially supported enterprise editions of them. Its commercial line is branded Solo Enterprise, with editions for kgateway, agentgateway, Istio and kagent, sold to Fortune 2000 enterprises and cloud-native organizations. The open source projects act as the adoption channel and technical foundation for the enterprise products.
Revenue comes from commercial enterprise editions and support for its open source projects (Solo Enterprise for kgateway, agentgateway, Istio and kagent) sold to enterprise customers; the sources do not disclose pricing or revenue figures.
Traction
Reported open source traction includes 65K+ GitHub stars, 28K+ community members and 3B+ downloads, plus top 10 CNCF contributor status and 236 public repositories in the solo-io GitHub organization. The company states its enterprise products are used by Fortune 2000 industry leaders and cloud-native innovators, and that it has raised $175 million in total venture funding, including a 2021 Series C at a $1 billion valuation.
Latest developments
Recent activity centers on agentic AI infrastructure. The company announced kagent, described as the industry's first open source agentic AI framework for Kubernetes and built on Microsoft AutoGen, and launched agentregistry, a centralized registry for curating, discovering, deploying and managing MCP servers, agents and skills on Kubernetes. At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2025 in Atlanta it delivered sessions and community announcements. Product releases include Solo Enterprise for Istio 1.29 (AWS ECS integration GA, global service aliasing) and 1.30 (agentgateway as waypoint/ingress/egress proxy in ambient mesh, ztunnel-native egress, new UI with advanced service graph, fine-grained workload identity). Technical publications cover MCP progressive disclosure and token reduction, multi-LLM provider routing, agent identity, agentic quality benchmarking, and the Linux Foundation's Agentic AI Foundation.
▸Full profile — market position, technology, go-to-market, geography, history
Market position
Solo.io positions itself as a leader in cloud-native application networking, stating that its Solo Enterprise products are chosen by Fortune 2000 industry leaders and cloud-native innovators across industries and geographies. Its open source footprint is reported as 65K+ GitHub stars, 28K+ community members and 3B+ downloads, with top 10 CNCF contributor status.
Solo.io's stated differentiators are its depth of upstream open source involvement and the resulting product foundations: it describes itself as a top 10 CNCF contributor, the #1 corporate and #1 individual contributor to Istio, holder of five Istio Steering Committee and three Technical Oversight Committee seats, and a co-creator of Istio and Ambient Mesh. It presents kgateway as the most trusted and most feature-rich API gateway for Kubernetes, built on Envoy and the Kubernetes Gateway API, and argues that its Rust-based agentgateway data plane is purpose-built for AI traffic rather than retrofitted onto legacy proxies.
Technology
The technology stack is built on open source cloud-native infrastructure: Istio and Ambient Mesh (sidecarless service mesh with ztunnel and waypoint proxies), Envoy proxy, the Kubernetes Gateway API, Kubernetes, Backstage, SPIFFE/SPIRE for identity, OpenTelemetry, OpenAPI, WebAssembly and Linux. kgateway is an Envoy-based cloud-native API and AI gateway; agentgateway is a Rust-powered data plane designed for AI and agentic traffic with MCP support, progressive disclosure, rate limiting, observability and OpenAPI-to-MCP exposure modes; kagent is an agentic AI framework for Kubernetes built on Microsoft AutoGen; agentregistry provides MCP server, agent and skill registries for Kubernetes.
Go-to-market
Go-to-market is led by open source adoption and community presence: the company maintains widely used projects (Istio, Ambient Mesh, kgateway, kagent, agentgateway, agentregistry) with associated Slack and Discord communities, publishes extensive technical blog content and migration guides (for example from Ingress NGINX to Kubernetes Gateway API), runs free hands-on technical labs on agentic AI, and participates heavily in CNCF events such as KubeCon + CloudNativeCon. Enterprise editions are then sold to platform engineering teams within large organizations, supported by a sales organization led by a VP of Sales.
Fortune 2000 enterprises and cloud-native organizations, specifically Kubernetes platform teams, platform engineers, DevOps teams and API teams building and operating microservices and AI/agentic applications.
Geography
Solo.io is a remote-first company with a registered address at 68 Harrison Avenue Ste 605 PMB 581361, Boston, MA 02111, United States, and states a regional presence across North America, Europe and APAC.
History
The company was founded by Idit Levine and announced a $3.25 million seed round while still in stealth, at which point it had already released Squash, an open source microservices debugger. Its gateway lineage began in 2018 with the creation of Gloo, the Envoy-based API gateway later renamed kgateway. In 2021 the company reported raising $135 million in Series C funding at a $1 billion valuation, bringing total venture funding to $175 million from investors including Altimeter Capital, Redpoint Ventures and True Ventures. In November 2024, kgateway was donated to the CNCF as a sandbox project and Istio's Ambient Mode reached general availability in Istio v1.24. In 2025 the company introduced kagent, an open source agentic AI framework for Kubernetes, and announced agentregistry and other agentic-AI initiatives at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2025.
Compiled by commissioned research from 10 cited public sources — 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 — not independently audited.
Related companies · 6
Companies working in the same space as Solo.
Timeline · 15
launches, deals, and filingsSolo.io attended KubeCon Europe, where it announced a project in Amsterdam.
Solo.io launched the agentevals open source project and contributed agentregistry to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
Solo.io announced the availability of Gloo Gateway 2.0.
Solo.io announced the availability of Solo Enterprise for kagent, described by the company as a context-aware platform for agents, tools and LLMs on Kubernetes.
Solo.io launched Agent Gateway and introduced Agent Mesh for unified AI connectivity.
Solo.io presented sessions and keynotes and made community announcements at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2025 in Atlanta, including agentregistry, a registry for MCP servers, agents and skills.
Release delivers general availability of AWS ECS integration and global service aliasing capabilities.
Release brings agentgateway into the ambient mesh as waypoint, ingress and egress proxy, adds egress controls in ztunnel, a revamped UI with a new Service Graph, and workload identity beyond the service account.
Solo.io announced kagent, described as an open source agentic AI framework for Kubernetes that provides a catalog of agents for running, building and sharing AI-driven cloud native solutions.
Istio's Ambient Mode, which Solo.io co-created, reached general availability in Istio v1.24 in November 2024.
kgateway, created in 2018 as part of 'Gloo', was donated to the CNCF in November 2024 as a sandbox project.
Solo.io states it secured $135 million in Series C funding at a $1 billion valuation in 2021.
$135M source ↗
kgateway, the Envoy-based cloud-native API gateway, was originally created in 2018 as part of the Gloo project.
Dated company events from announcements, filings, and press; legal rows summarize public dockets and regulator releases.
Legal entities · 1
corporate structureIn the news
▸Research sources · 10
primary sources listed
- Solosolo.io · web
- solo.io Company Overview, Contact Details & Competitors | LeadIQleadiq.com · web
10 public sources were cited for this profile; the first-party ones are listed here.
Frequently asked questions
- What does Solo do?
- Solo.io builds enterprise cloud-native networking and AI gateway products on open source projects including Istio, Envoy, kgateway and kagent.
- Who founded Solo?
- Solo was founded by Idit Levine in 2017.
- Who are Solo's investors?
- Solo's investors include Redpoint Ventures, True Ventures, Altimeter Capital, Zypsy Capital, Haystack, WestWave Capital.
- How much funding has Solo raised?
- Solo has disclosed $166.8M raised across 4 of its 7 known rounds.
- Where is Solo headquartered?
- Solo is headquartered in Cambridge, US.