Solo.io wins ‘most likely to succeed’ award at VB Transform 2025 innovation showcase

Solo.io, a company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has been recognized with the prestigious title of "Most Likely to Succeed" at the Innovation Showcase during the VB Transform conference held in San Francisco on June 25. Established in 2017, this cloud-native application networking firm has raised $135 million in a Series C funding round back in 2021 and currently holds a valuation of $1 billion. Their main focus is on providing advanced tools for connecting, securing, and observing modern applications, particularly those developed using Kubernetes and microservices. At the showcase, Solo.io unveiled its innovative Kagent Studio, a groundbreaking cloud-native framework designed to assist DevOps and platform engineers in the construction and management of AI agents within Kubernetes environments. Keith Babo, the Chief Product Officer of Solo.io, took to the main stage to present this new offering, emphasizing its potential to tackle platform engineering challenges effectively. Babo noted, "It's the first framework of its kind that targets this audience that’s building and running on Kubernetes for agents. We wanted to integrate this directly into the tools used by platform engineers on a daily basis." The Kagent framework operates as a native extension within Visual Studio Code, streamlining various core platform engineering workflows, including incident response. For instance, when a PagerDuty alert appears in an engineer's IDE, the Kagent agents running locally are capable of acknowledging the incident and initiating diagnostics immediately. This process allows engineers to monitor live data, including charts, logs, and the status of core infrastructure, right in their development environment. Idit Levine, the founder and CEO of Solo.io, expressed her belief that Kagent Studio is a vital engineering tool akin to Salesforce's CRM for sales teams across organizations. She highlighted its ability to connect context and facilitate communication across multiple platforms and engineering subteams. Winning the "Most Likely to Succeed" award serves as a strong validation of their product and reflects the growing interest from enterprises. With over 1,000 contributors and more than 1,100 GitHub stars, Kagent Studio is already making waves, with users actively running it in production environments. Currently, it is in a closed preview phase, and interested users can request access via the company’s Discord server. The Innovation Showcase also featured feedback from a panel of venture capitalists and other finalists, further underscoring the competitive landscape of innovation in cloud-native technologies.