Dylibso: Delivering Developer Tools to Take WebAssembly to Production…Welcome to the Boldstart Family!
We get fired up about new market creation at boldstart. To execute this well, you need a blend of deep end user understanding, lived experience of the daily workflows of those end users, and of course founders who can see the future and convince others of the golden path ahead.
When we first met Steve Manuel, from an introduction by Matt Butcher, we were blown away by the vision he had for where WebAssembly would go and the tooling that would be required to enable developers to achieve that vision. For those who are new to WebAssembly, it allows for code written in any language to be compiled into Wasm binaries which can execute on any environment. There are inherent aspects of Wasm that make it a great for browser and server side use cases. Benefits include: deny by default security from sandboxed execution, interoperability, startup speed & execution speed amongst others. Many of these benefits are hard to access currently because the lack of tooling for developers which Dylibso is solving!
Today we are thrilled to announce boldstart’s day one partnership with Dylibso, co-leading a $6.6M seed round with our friends at Felicis including participation from Pebblebed and Crew Capital. Dylibso is building products to enable developers to build with WebAssembly and use it in production. We are lucky to partner with Steve, Zach, and Ben on the journey.
Dylibso currently has two products which help developers use Wasm. Extism is a universal plug-in system. It enables ANY program to be extensible: web apps, mobile apps, backend systems, etc. Since it’s public launch in December of 2022, it has grown to 1.8k Github stars, an active community on Discord, and has multiple contributions from the community adding new language support. In 3 months, the product now supports 16+ languages with that number growing everyday. The potential of this technology is huge. Imagine any company with an app store or any open source project, allowing developers to easily contribute applications/extensions (i.e. plug-ins) in any language they chose to write in, all with WebAssembly’s inherent security from its sandboxed execution. Extism is bringing about a future where the velocity of products extending into various workflows will accelerate exponentially, increasing the interoperability of all products.
Modsurfer is Dylibso’s 2nd product that launched publicly on March 24th. The amazing thing about WebAssembly is that any language can compile into Wasm binaries. The issue is that when everything compiles into a binary, how the heck do you figure out what’s happening inside! There’s dependencies on dependencies with developers basically having to hope that everything executes seamlessly. Modsurfer is the first product to allow developers x-ray like visibility into the binaries. Now developers can understand the complexity of a Wasm binary they interact with, what are the components inside, and what exactly got compiled. No longer is it black magic and hope, developers can finally understand exactly what’s happening, enabling monitoring and optimization of what’s compiled.
The team is not stopping there. The sole goal of Dylibso is to enable more developers to build with Wasm and use it in production with as little friction as possible. The deny-by-default security model, interoperability, startup & execution speed, and now extensibility of Wasm will unlock all sorts of new frontiers for developers to explore on both server side and browser side. Dylibso will be there providing the tooling to make this all happen.
If you’re an engineer or company excited about WebAssembly’s potential and curious about how you try out the product, help the company, or join in the efforts, please reach out to me and I will put you in touch with the team!
To read more about Dylibso’s launch and funding announcement:
