DigitalOcean has acquired Katanemo Labs to expand its capabilities in agentic AI infrastructure, moving beyond inference into the operational layer of AI systems.
The acquisition brings Katanemo’s AI-native data plane, open-source Plano project, and specialized small action models into DigitalOcean’s platform. The combined offering is designed to help developers build, deploy, and continuously improve AI agents in production environments.
Katanemo’s technology focuses on orchestration, observability, and safety, addressing key challenges in scaling AI systems reliably. Its Plano data plane abstracts much of the complexity involved in running agentic systems, enabling faster deployment and improved operational performance. The company’s models, including Arch-router and Plano-Orchestrator, provide routing and orchestration capabilities tailored for real-world AI workloads.
As part of the deal, Katanemo co-founder and CEO Salman Paracha has joined DigitalOcean as Senior Vice President of AI.
The acquisition also introduces a signal-based observability approach that transforms production traces into actionable insights. This allows developers to better understand agent behavior, diagnose failures, and improve performance over time. The move aligns with industry findings that fewer than 10 percent of AI use cases progress beyond pilot stages, and that observability is a critical requirement for effectively scaling AI systems.
DigitalOcean plans to integrate Katanemo’s research and infrastructure into its broader strategy of delivering a full-stack platform for AI-native applications. By combining GPU infrastructure, cloud services, and agentic AI primitives, the company aims to provide developers with a simplified and scalable environment for deploying intelligent systems.
The acquisition is not expected to have a material impact on DigitalOcean’s financial results for 2026.
KEY QUOTES:
“The agentic era demands more than GPU capacity—it requires a new class of infrastructure primitives. 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.”
Vinay Kumar, Chief Product and Technology Officer, DigitalOcean
“We started Katanemo Labs with a simple belief: offer developers durable infrastructure primitives that help them build agents faster. 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.”
Salman Paracha, Co-Founder and CEO, Katanemo Labs
