We are Buoyant

Our mission is to create a world where people can trust the technology they rely on, by giving everyone the power to build innovative, reliable, and secure software.

Our story

Founded in 2015 by Twitter infrastructure engineers William Morgan and Oliver Gould, Buoyant pioneered the service mesh category with Linkerd, the lightest, fastest, and most secure service mesh on the planet. Today, Linkerd powers the critical production infrastructure for leading organizations around the world, and Buoyant continues to spearhead security and simplicity for Kubernetes platforms everywhere.

Our partners

  1. February 2015

    Buoyant founded

  2. February 2016

    First public release of Linkerd

    September 2016

    Buoyant coins the "service mesh" term;
    First Linkerd production users

I spend a lot of time dealing with vendors, and dealing with Buoyant has been excellent. We've had great, responsive support. We also have a direct line of communication with competent engineers able to help us."— Rich Prillinger, Senior Director of Platform Engineering at Mezmo

Leadership Team

William Morgan
CEO & Founder
LinkedinTwitter
Oliver Gould
CTO & Founder
LinkedinTwitter
Catherine Paganini
Head of Marketing
LinkedinTwitter
Gary Myk
VP
LinkedinTwitter

February 2015

Founded

February 2016

First public Linkerd release

September 2016

Linkerd coins the "service mesh" term; First Linkerd production users

January 2017

Linkerd becomes the CNCF's 5th project

April 2017

Linkerd 1.0 released

April 2018

Linkerd becomes a CNCF incubating-level project

September 2018

Linkerd 2.0 released

December 2018

Linkerd adds per-route metrics

April 2019

Linkerd adds mTLS

October 2019

Linkerd adds distributed tracing

June 2020

Linkerd adds multi-cluster support

November 2020

Linkerd adds ARM support

March 2021

Buoyant Cloud in early access

June 2021

Buoyant Cloud public beta

July 2021

Linkerd achieves CNCF graduation

Awards

Containers Traiblazers Award
2022
Containers Traiblazers Award

Awarded to container startups offering innovative solutions to enterprises. This recognition seeks to recognize the early-stage companies who are delivering next-generation application infrastructure that help containers evolve from developer laptops to full-scale enterprise production success stories.

Digital Innovator Award
2021
Digital Innovator Award

Intellyx is an analyst firm focused on enterprise digital transformation and the vendors that support it. Its Digital Innovator Award recognizes organizations that are the most disruptive and innovative firms in their space.

Tracxn Emerging Startups of IT Opertions
2021 and 2023
Tracxn Emerging Startups of IT Opertions

Tracxn Emerging Startups provides a handpicked selection of high growth and high potential companies, founded since 2013, that are making an impact in the new-age sectors. The shortlisting is based on a combination of multiple publicly available signals and detailed analysis of the company by our internal sector specialist teams.

Tech Ascension Awards
2021
Tech Ascension Awards

The Tech Ascension Awards recognizes the very best innovations in B2C and B2B technology, judging applicants based on technology innovation and uniqueness, market research (analyst reports, media coverage, customer case studies), hard performance stats, and competitive differentiators.

IDC Innovators: Service Mesh
2020
IDC Innovators: Service Mesh

IDC Innovators are emerging vendors with revenue <$100 million that have demonstrated either a groundbreaking business model or an innovative new technology — or both. In 2020, the IDC Innovators study profiled Buoyant among other service mesh companies.

Gartner Cool Vendor
2018
Gartner Cool Vendor

Digital business transformation demands new approaches to building distributed architectures and making diverse systems work together. This report features three Cool Vendors with innovative offerings for application leaders responsible for architecture, infrastructure, and integration.

Containers Trailblazers Award, 2022

Awarded to container startups offering innovative solutions to enterprises. This recognition seeks to recognize the early-stage companies who are delivering next-generation application infrastructure that help containers evolve from developer laptops to full-scale enterprise production success stories.

award

Tracxn Emerging Startups of IT Opertions, 2021

Tracxn Emerging Startups provides a handpicked selection of high growth and high potential companies, founded since 2013, that are making an impact in the new-age sectors. The shortlisting is based on a combination of multiple publicly available signals and detailed analysis of the company by our internal sector specialist teams.

award

Digital Innovator Award, 2021

Intellyx is an analyst firm focused on enterprise digital transformation and the vendors that support it. Its Digital Innovator Award recognizes organizations that are the most disruptive and innovative firms in their space.

Tech Ascension Award, 2021

The Tech Ascension Awards recognizes the very best innovations in B2C and B2B technology, judging applicants based on technology innovation and uniqueness, market research (analyst reports, media coverage, customer case studies), hard performance stats, and competitive differentiators.

IDC Innovators: Service Mesh, 2020

IDC Innovators are emerging vendors with revenue <$100 million that have demonstrated either a groundbreaking business model or an innovative new technology — or both. In 2020, the IDC Innovators study profiled Buoyant among other service mesh companies.

Gartner cool vendor award, 2018

Digital business transformation demands new approaches to building distributed architectures and making diverse systems work together. This report features three Cool Vendors with innovative offerings for application leaders responsible for architecture, infrastructure, and integration.

Investors

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