WebAssembly (WASM) innovator Dylibso announced it has secured $6.6 million in seed funding led by Felicis with participation from pre-seed investors boldstart ventures, Pebblebed and Crew Capital. The funding will be used to support the company’s mission of helping teams take WebAssembly to production. Dylibso is the company behind the popular open source Universal Plug-in System, Extism, and today announced the general availability of its first product, Modsurfer, the system of record for WASM.
“Developers often struggle to use WebAssembly due to the technology’s lack of tooling,” said Paul Nashawaty, principal analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “We are seeing in our research and expect the market for WebAssembly and its value to developers to rival – if not be larger – than container adoption, but the right tools need to be available to help developers through the entire development lifecycle and bring WebAssembly into production. Dylibso enables developers to easily use WebAssembly with a suite of products that help them integrate WebAssembly and gain critical insight and visibility into their binary code.”
“We are focused on delivering best-in-class tools for developers to have everything they need to be successful with WASM in development, integration and in production,” said Steve Manuel, co-founder and CEO of Dylibso. “We look forward to partnering with our customers and investors to innovate in the WebAssembly ecosystem and solve many developer pain points felt today. With the systems and tooling we’re building, WASM should be the compilation target of choice for all developers shipping code.”
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Providing Dev and Ops Teams with a Secure System of Record
Modsurfer provides dev and ops teams with a system of record plus diagnostics applications to track, investigate, search and validate WebAssembly modules, allowing developers to gain visibility and analytics into their WebAssembly binaries. Modsurfer exposes the internal contents necessary to debug modules and ensure compatibility with runtime environments. This X-ray-like capability is something developers have not had access to before. Key features in Modsurfer include:
- Fully auditable database of modules, specifically indexed for search and debugging;
- Ability to extract critical information from opaque binary format with security scanning and CLI/GitHub action for pipeline integration; and,
- Upgrade path from free to enterprise when headed to production.
Additionally, Modsurfer brings maturity to WebAssembly in four core areas – serverless, browser, plug-ins and Web3/blockchain.
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Make All Software Programmable
Introduced in December 2022, Extism has experienced rapid adoption and surpassed 1,700 GitHub stars. Powered by WebAssembly, its focus is to make any program extensible by end-users and has been adopted in large projects across GitHub. It is currently receiving community contributions for new language SDKs including Java, C# and Zig which add to 13 other languages, including Go, Rust, Ruby, Python, PHP and more. A key new feature recently made available is the added Host Functions which give users the ability to inject any custom functionality they want to give their plugins access to (e.g. make a database query, use a native function, etc).
“We were immediately impressed by the Dylibso team’s knowledge of WebAssembly and approach to advancing the entire ecosystem,” said Viviana Faga, general partner, Felicis. “We believe this market can be larger than containers, and look forward to working with Steve and the team at Dylibso to continue delivering critical and innovative products.”
“We have heard from multiple developers exploring WebAssembly because of the benefits around interoperability, speed, and security that have trouble getting past the exploration stage because of the challenges with currently using the technology,” said Shomik Ghosh, partner, boldstart ventures. “Steve, Zach, and Ben showed us the path forward with their vision for Dylibso to create tools that developers love and enjoy using to unlock the benefits of Wasm. They are not only making it easier to use Wasm but also expanding the use cases of the technology into new areas.”
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