$1B Solo.io’s Kagent Studio brings AI agents to Kubernetes workflows

Solo.io has won the “Most Likely to Succeed” award at VB Transform 2025’s Innovation Showcase, where the billion-dollar cloud-native application networking company announced Kagent Studio, a framework for building and managing AI agents in Kubernetes environments. The recognition validates enterprise interest in Solo.io’s platform engineering solutions, particularly as companies increasingly adopt AI-driven automation within their cloud infrastructure.

What you should know: Kagent Studio is the first cloud-native framework specifically designed for DevOps and platform engineers to build, secure, run and manage AI agents in Kubernetes.

• The framework integrates natively with VSCode (a popular code editor) and provides real-time incident response capabilities, automated root cause analysis, and live infrastructure monitoring.
• It enables bilateral communication between workplace platforms like Slack and Teams and the integrated development environment (IDE), which is the software where engineers write and test code.
• The tool has already gained significant traction with 1,000-plus contributors, 1,100-plus GitHub stars, and users running it in production.

How it works: The framework operates as a native VSCode extension that streamlines core platform engineering workflows, particularly incident response.

• When a PagerDuty alert (a notification about system problems) appears in the IDE, engineers can acknowledge it and AI agents running locally will immediately begin diagnosing the issue.
• “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,” explained Keith Babo, Solo.io’s chief product officer.
• The system allows engineers to instruct whether to move forward, enabling human-AI collaboration in issue resolution.

The big picture: Solo.io positions Kagent Studio as an essential engineering tool comparable to Salesforce’s CRM for sales teams.

• CEO and founder Idit Levine said the framework “connects context and communication across platforms and platform engineering subteams.”
• The company, founded in 2017, raised $135 million in Series C funding in 2021 and is valued at $1 billion.
• Solo.io’s core business provides tools for connecting, securing and observing modern applications built on Kubernetes and microservices.

What they’re saying: Industry leaders emphasized the framework’s practical impact on platform engineering workflows.

• “It’s the first framework of its kind that targets this audience that’s building and running on Kubernetes for agents,” Babo said. “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.”
• Levine described winning the award as “great validation for us” and indicative of enterprise interest in their offering.

What’s next: Kagent Studio is currently in a closed preview phase, with users able to request access through the company’s Discord server.

• The Innovation Showcase featured presentations to industry decision-makers and feedback from venture capital judges including Emily Zhao from Salesforce Ventures, Matt Kraning from Menlo Ventures, and Rebecca Li from Amex Ventures.
• Other winners included CTGT and Catio, with finalists including Kumo, Superduper.io, Sutro and Qdrant.