DigitalOcean Acquires Katanemo Labs to Accelerate the Inference Cloud for the Agentic Era

Key Terms

agentic ai technical

Agentic AI refers to computer systems that can make their own decisions and take actions without needing someone to tell them what to do each time. It's like giving a robot a degree of independence to solve problems or achieve goals on its own, which matters because it could change how we work and interact with technology in everyday life.

data plane technical

The data plane is the part of a network or software system that actually moves and processes user data—think of it as the highway where packets and files travel and get handled. Investors care because its performance, capacity, and reliability directly affect service speed, uptime, and costs; weaknesses can lead to slower products, higher operating expenses, or regulatory risk, while improvements can enable growth and competitive advantage.

observability technical

Observability is a company’s ability to see and understand what its software systems are doing by collecting and analyzing signals like logs, metrics and traces. For investors it matters because strong observability reduces the risk of downtime, hidden bugs or security issues, supports faster fixes and efficient scaling, and therefore can protect revenue, lower costs and signal disciplined operations — like having clear gauges and alarms on a complex machine.

gpu technical

A GPU (graphics processing unit) is a specialized computer chip designed to handle many calculations at once, originally for rendering images and video but now widely used for tasks like artificial intelligence, data analysis and high-performance computing. Investors watch GPU demand and prices because strong sales often signal growth for chip makers and their customers, affect profit margins and capital spending, and can forecast wider trends in gaming, AI adoption and cloud services.

DigitalOcean acquires Katanemo Labs, Inc., a leader in agentic AI infrastructure, bringing Agentic AI Primitives into its Agentic Inference Cloud.

BROOMFIELD, Colo.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- DigitalOcean (NYSE: DOCN), the Agentic Inference Cloud built for production AI, today announced it has acquired Katanemo Labs, Inc., the models and research company focused on infrastructure for agentic AI, including its open source project, Plano, the data plane software for agentic applications. With Katanemo Labs, DigitalOcean extends its platform beyond inference into the operational layer of agentic systems — enabling developers to build, run, and continuously improve AI agents in production on a single platform.

As part of the acquisition, Salman Paracha, co-founder and CEO of Katanemo Labs, has joined DigitalOcean as Senior Vice President of AI.

Over the past year, advances in models and GPU availability have accelerated experimentation with AI agents. Together, DigitalOcean and Katanemo Labs provide a production-ready foundation, combining cloud infrastructure, an AI-native data plane, and specialized models, to help teams move from concept to production with confidence. As the industry shifts toward real-world deployment, the primary challenge has moved beyond model access to the complexity of running reliable, safe, and observable systems at scale.

“The agentic era demands more than GPU capacity—it requires a new class of infrastructure primitives,” said Vinay Kumar, Chief Product and Technology Officer of DigitalOcean. “Katanemo Labs has spent years building exactly that: an AI-native data plane and specialized models that make multi-agent systems reliable, observable, and fast to deploy. With Katanemo Labs’s suite of products and advanced research, we are accelerating the path from prototype to production by giving developers the predictability and performance they need to scale with confidence.”

Katanemo Labs brings a differentiated combination of model research and open-source infrastructure, tailored specifically for agentic workloads. This includes foundational work across small action models, orchestration, observability, and safety—capabilities required to operate next-generation AI systems in real-world environments with predictable performance and operational simplicity.

Central to Katanemo’s AI innovation is a novel framework-agnostic data plane developed under the team’s Plano open-source project. The data plane abstracts out complexity in building agentic systems, including orchestration, safety, and observability, to help teams build and deploy faster and more reliably in production. Katanemo Labs small action models, including Arch-router and Plano-Orchestrator, complement its data plan software, attracting strong interest across the developer community for their flexibility and performance in real-world applications. Together, they give teams the routing, orchestration, and observability layer needed to build and deploy agents faster and more reliably in production.

As part of this expanded strategy, DigitalOcean will also bring Katanemo Labs’s proprietary observability research to market through a novel signal-based technology to efficiently identify informative interactions for post-deployment improvement. This technology introduces a new approach to agentic observability — turning production traces into actionable insights on agent behavior. This helps teams identify what’s working, diagnose failures, and continuously improve performance over time.

Signals research is critical because the long-term challenge is operating agentic systems reliably in production. McKinsey research shows that fewer than 10% of use cases deployed ever make it past the pilot stage and identifies observability as a key capability for enabling large-scale, intelligent agent ecosystems to operate safely and efficiently. Through Katanemo Labs’s signals-based innovation, DigitalOcean aims to tackle that need by transforming production traces into actionable behavioral indicators for debugging, evaluation, and continuous improvement.

“We started Katanemo Labs with a simple belief: offer developers durable infrastructure primitives that help them build agents faster,” said Salman Paracha, co-founder and CEO of Katanemo Labs. “We built Plano to offload functions like orchestration, observability, and safety in a framework-agnostic way so that teams can ship faster and operate with confidence. Joining DigitalOcean allows us to bring that vision—and our work in agentic observability—to a much broader global community.”

This acquisition reinforces DigitalOcean’s broader strategy to power the next generation of AI-native applications. By combining production-ready GPU infrastructure with a full-stack cloud and an expanding set of agentic primitives, DigitalOcean enables developers and businesses to build, scale, and optimize intelligent systems with simplicity and predictable economics.

The acquisition is not expected to have a material impact on DigitalOcean’s financial results for 2026.

About DigitalOcean

DigitalOcean is the Agentic Inference Cloud built for AI-native and Digital-native enterprises scaling production workloads. The platform combines production-ready GPU infrastructure with a full-stack cloud to deliver operational simplicity and predictable economics at scale. By integrating inference capabilities with core cloud services, DigitalOcean’s Agentic Inference Cloud enables customers to expand as they grow — driving durable, compounding usage over time. More than 640,000 customers trust DigitalOcean to power their cloud and AI infrastructure. To learn more, visit www.digitalocean.com.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260402272982/en/

Media Relations

Meghan Grady

press@digitalocean.com

Investor Relations

Radu Patrichi, CFA

investors@digitalocean.com

Source: DigitalOcean