When the former Shopify CTO describes a type of tech as “generational technology,” you pay attention. When you discover that teams at Adobe, Figma, Cloudflare, Google, Microsoft, and other leading companies are all utilizing the same technology, you dig in. This is how WebAssembly (Wasm) caught our eye. As we uncovered more, we became increasingly excited about the potential for WebAssembly to change client and server-side web development.
WebAssembly means developers can increase the amount of software they produce in a way that is more customizable, faster, and secure. These applications are more reliable and can be built on top of existing web technology. This game-changing infrastructure has the chance to revolutionize software development forever.
Today we’re excited to announce that we’re leading the Seed investment in Dylibso, the best way for developers to take WebAssembly to production. With Dylibso, developers can trust that their code will have more:
- Portability. Code written in any language (including C, C++, Rust, Go, and others) can be compiled to Wasm and executed in any browser or platform that supports Wasm without modification (which is most modern browsers).
- Speed. Wasm speeds up the performance of web applications by allowing code that would normally run more slowly to be compiled and run faster.
- Security. Wasm is designed to be secure and sandboxed, meaning it can run safely within a web browser without posing a security risk.
But despite all of Wasm’s advantages, it is universally considered difficult to use. And if something is difficult for developers, it won’t be adopted. Dylibso improves the developer experience of using Wasm by creating robust developer tooling.
The team at Dylibso has a long history of building software and tools for WebAssembly, from co-creating Extism—an open-source universal plug-in system that makes any type of software extensible—to their second product Modsurfer—the first application that gives technical teams the ability to search, browse, validate, audit, and investigate Wasm binaries. These tools are just the beginning of how Dylibso will empower developers. And the community is responding positively: Extism has over 1.8K GitHub stars and is already available in over 16 languages!
CEO and co-founder Steve Manuel previously worked at Cloudflare and saw firsthand how lacking the Wasm developer experience was. That compelled him to create Extism and continue building tooling to better support the trailblazing Wasm developer community. We are delighted to partner with Steve, Zach, Benjamin, and the Dylibso team as they help make the transformative power of WebAssembly accessible to engineering teams everywhere.
Read more about the company and their latest product, Modsurfer, in TechCrunch.
