Solo

Solo.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.