DigitalOcean has acquired Katanemo Labs, a leader in agentic AI infrastructure, to extend its Agentic Inference Cloud with new primitives for building, running, and improving AI agents in production. Salman Paracha joins as SVP of AI.
DigitalOcean (NYSE: DOCN), the Agentic Inference Cloud built for production AI, has acquired Katanemo Labs, Inc., a company focused on infrastructure for agentic AI and developer of the open-source Plano project. The acquisition brings specialized agentic AI primitives into DigitalOcean’s platform, enabling developers to build, run, and continuously improve AI agents in production on a single unified system.
As AI agents move beyond experimentation into real-world deployment, organizations need more than GPU capacity. They require robust infrastructure primitives for orchestration, observability, safety, and reliable operation at scale. By acquiring Katanemo Labs, DigitalOcean extends its platform beyond inference to include the full operational layer needed for agentic systems.
“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 differentiated model research and open-source infrastructure specifically designed for agentic workloads. Key contributions include foundational work in small action models, orchestration, observability, and safety.
Central to its innovation is the Plano open-source project — a framework-agnostic AI-native data plane that abstracts complexity in building agentic systems. This includes orchestration, safety, and observability capabilities that help teams deploy faster and more reliably. Katanemo’s small action models, such as Arch-router and Plano-Orchestrator, complement the data plane by providing flexible routing and orchestration for real-world applications.
The acquisition also introduces Katanemo’s proprietary observability research through a novel signal-based technology. This approach transforms production traces into actionable insights on agent behavior, helping teams identify successes, diagnose failures, and continuously improve agent performance over time. Observability remains critical, as research indicates that fewer than 10% of AI use cases successfully move past the pilot stage.
As part of the acquisition, Salman Paracha, co-founder and CEO of Katanemo Labs, has joined DigitalOcean as Senior Vice President of AI.
“We started Katanemo Labs with a simple belief: offer developers durable infrastructure primitives that help them build agents faster,” said Salman Paracha. “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 strategic move strengthens DigitalOcean’s position in the growing agentic AI market by combining production-ready GPU infrastructure with a full-stack cloud and specialized agentic primitives. The combined platform aims to deliver operational simplicity and predictable economics for developers building AI-native applications.
The acquisition is not expected to have a material impact on DigitalOcean’s financial results for 2026.
This development is highly relevant for SaaS, IT, and technology teams focused on scaling production AI workloads and deploying reliable agentic systems in enterprise environments.
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.
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