Cambridge, Mass.-based Solo.io was awarded “Most Likely to Succeed” at the Innovation Showcase at VB Transform in San Francisco on June 25.

Founded in 2017, the cloud-native application networking company — which raised $135 million in a Series C round in 2021 and is valued at $1 billion — provides tools for connecting, securing and observing modern applications, particularly those built on Kubernetes and microservices.

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Introducing Kagent Studio

The company’s Kagent platform is a first-of-its-kind cloud native framework that helps DevOps and platform engineers build and run AI agents in Kubernetes. During the Innovation Showcase at this year’s VB Transform, the company announced the launch of Kagent Studio, a framework that allows enterprises to build, secure, run and manage their AI agents in Kubernetes. 

Keith Babo, the company’s CPO, presented the new offering from VB Transform’s main stage. He said the framework aims to address platform engineering challenges by offering features including:

• Native VSCode extension integration
• Real-time incident response capabilities
• Bilateral communication between workplace communications platforms such as Slack and Teams and the integrated development environment (IDE)
• Automated root cause analysis generation
• Live infrastructure monitoring and diagnostics

“It’s the first framework of its kind that targets this audience that’s building and running on Kubernetes for agents,” Babo said in an interview with VentureBeat. “We wanted to make sure that we could bring that directly into the tools that platform engineers are using on a day-to-day basis.”

Babo said the framework operates as a native extension in VS code and checks the boxes on many core platform engineering workflows, including incident response.

“So you get maybe a PagerDuty alert that shows up in your IDE. You can acknowledge it and immediately our agents running locally inside the IDE will pick up that incident and start to diagnose. All of this is live right in front of the engineer. So you’re seeing the actual charts and the logs and the status of the core pods or infrastructure under which you’re running, and you’re getting all that live and the human in the loop the whole time,” he explained.

The engineer then instructs the system to move forward (or not), allowing the agent and human to coexist and partner in the effective resolution of this issue, Babo added. 

He said the framework will allow for the live injection of context from the communications platforms to the IDE, with analysis being shared back to the communications platform, enabling bilateral communication for people working on the issue.

Salesforce for platform engineers

Idit Levine, the company’s founder and CEO, said in an interview with VentureBeat that she sees Kagent Studio as an “essential engineering tool,” similar to Salesforce’s CRM, which is essential for sales teams across the enterprise. She said Kagent Studio connects context and communication across platforms and platform engineering subteams.

Levine said winning the “Most Likely to Succeed” award was “great validation for us” and indicative of enterprise interest in their offering.

Kagent Studio has already gained significant traction, according to Babo and Levine. It has 1,000-plus contributors, 1,100-plus GitHub stars, and users already running it in production. It is currently in a closed preview phase; users can request access. More information can be found on the discord server. 

Each finalist presented to an audience of industry decision-makers and received feedback from a panel of venture capital judges at the showcase. These included Emily Zhao, principal at Salesforce Ventures; Matt Kraning, partner at Menlo Ventures; and Rebecca Li, investment director at Amex Ventures.

Read about other winners CTGT and Catio. Finalists included Kumo, Superduper.io, Sutro and Qdrant.

Editor’s note: As a thank-you to our readers, we’ve opened up early bird registration for VB Transform 2026 — at just $200. This is where AI ambition meets operational reality, and you’re going to want to be in the room. Reserve your spot now.