Solo.io is a cloud connectivity company offering Gloo Gateway, a cloud-native API gateway built on Envoy, and Gloo Mesh to simplify Istio service mesh management for Kubernetes. The company released an MCP gateway for kgateway and donated agentgateway to the Linux Foundation. In 2021 Solo.io raised $135 million at a $1 billion valuation, a tenfold increase from 2020. Leadership took the funding to buy time for experimentation and strategic adjustments. The founder expected a market bubble in 2021 and prepared accordingly. Early leadership hires were mistakes that informed later company structure and focus. Solo.io also pursues AI-related products alongside core connectivity tools.
"Solo.io is a cloud connectivity company. Its main cloud products are Gloo Gateway, a cloud-native API gateway built on Envoy, and Gloo Mesh, which aims to simplify Istio service mesh management for Kubernetes. And, of course, there are the inevitable AI-related products. When we spoke to Levine, Solo.io had just announced an MCP gateway for kgateway (described by the company as "the ecosystem's most mature and widely deployed cloud-native API gateway"). Most recently, the company announced that it had donated agentgateway to the Linux Foundation."
"In 2021, the company announced a $135 million funding round at a company valuation of $1 billion - a tenfold increase since the previous round in October 2020. It's impressive in the pre-AI era, but was taken, according to Levine, because she reckoned there was a bubble that was just about to pop. "I predicted," she says, "that the bubble that was in 2021, all this crazy race, is going to disappear."
"I feel that a founder always needs to be a little bit stupidly optimistic." Solo.io CEO Idit Levine has been on an interesting journey in cloud computing since starting the networking and API management company in 2017. If you're looking at a project that is successful today, it was after a big company leans into it and is actually paying people to work with you on that project ...
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