Dylibso raises $6.6 million to help developers bring WebAssembly to production

WebAssembly (Wasm for short) is an open standard that allows browser-based applications to run with near-native performance. It has also expanded to support non-browser environments, which is the source of much of the recent hype around it. But like any emerging technology, it needs a stronger tooling ecosystem to realize its full potential.

One of the companies pushing in this direction is Dylibso, a startup that’s on a mission to help development teams get Wasm into production. The company, which announced $6.6 million in seed funding today at the Wasm I/O conference in Barcelona, ​​has made a name for itself with Extism, its open-source universal plug-in system that allows developers to integrate WebAssembly into their non-WebAssembly code base. It also launches Modsurfer, a registration system and diagnostic tool for WebAssembly, generally available today.

The company’s funding round was led by Felicis, with participation from Boldstart Ventures, Pebblebed and Crew Capital.

Dylibso co-founder and CEO Steve Manuel previously worked at Cloudflare, where he provided Wasm support for that company’s Workers product, as well as quantum computing startup Rigetti Computing.

“As someone who likes other languages ​​more than JavaScript – to put it mildly – I thought, you know, I need to use this WebAssembly runtime to bring another language to Cloudflare workers,” Manual said. As a side project, he built a framework compiled on WebAssembly from Rust and integrated with Cloudflare APIs. But in the process, he also realized that once this code was running in production, he had no real opportunity to observe it working, which made debugging difficult.

“There are lots of places – and lots of existing code and runtimes – where developers would like to tweak their language of choice a bit,” he explained. “WebAssembly gives you a great solution from a security and performance perspective to be able to reliably run that code in another environment, but compiled from a different language.”

And that’s the core idea behind Extism, which Dylibso launched in December 2022. It’s an open-source plug-in system that allows developers to run any code that can be compiled on WebAssembly at inside any program that has already been written in another language. . “The goal is really to make it as easy as possible to integrate WebAssembly into your program, whether your program already uses Wasm or not. Never mind. It’s easy to do,” said Manuel. He emphasized that this is not a commercial product but primarily intended to accelerate the adoption of WebAssembly, especially for code that runs outside of the browser.

Modsurfer aims to solve Manuel’s other problem: understanding how WebAssembly code runs in production – and why it might fail. It’s available for developers for free, but it’s also Dylibso’s first commercial product, as it will also feature an enterprise version of Modsurfer.

Picture credits: Dylibso

“Modsurfer gives you this single window for all the WebAssembly code you care about and keep track of,” Manuel explained. It’s supposed to be part of the logging system, allowing developers to keep track of all the WebAssembly code they run, and a partial analysis tool for that code. Since WebAssembly is a binary format, the code sits in a bit of a black box that Modsurfer aims to open up these modules for developers. It analyzes the code (and can often detect what language it was originally written in) and returns data about its complexity, imports and exports, namespaces, etc. “We analyze and conduct what’s called a cyclomatic complexity analysis, where we actually determine the risk profile of running this code in your environment,” Manuel said.

Modsurfer is now generally available.

Picture credits: Dylibso

“Developers often struggle to use WebAssembly due to the technology’s lack of tools,” said Paul Nashawaty, principal analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “We see in our research and expect that the market for WebAssembly and its value to developers will rival – if not be greater – than container adoption, but the right tools need to be available to help developers throughout along the development lifecycle and bring WebAssembly into production Dylibso makes it easy for developers to use WebAssembly with a suite of products that help them integrate WebAssembly and gain critical insight and visibility into their binary code.