The Agentic Era Demands a New Class of Infrastructure: DigitalOcean Acquires Katanemo Labs

The Agentic Era Demands a New Class of Infrastructure: DigitalOcean Acquires Katanemo Labs Bridging the Production Gap Accelerating the Agentic Stack with Data Plane and Observability Innovation A Unified Home for AI-Native Enterprises What’s Next: Join Us at Deploy About the author Try DigitalOcean for free Related Articles Run Advanced Reasoning on DigitalOcean with Arcee AI's Trinity Large-Thinking Now Available: DigitalOcean Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) NVIDIA GTC 2026 Confirmed It: The Inference Era Is Here By Vinay Kumar, DigitalOcean Chief Product & Technology Officer Updated: April 2, 2026 3 min read At DigitalOcean, we have been vocal about our strategic shift: we are building the world’s premier Agentic Inference Cloud. Our mission is to provide the foundation where AI-native enterprises build and run production inference at scale. Today, I am thrilled to announce a significant step in that journey: we have acquired Katanemo Labs, Inc. , a leader in agentic AI infrastructure. By integrating Katanemo Labs, we are extending our platform further into the critical operational layer of agentic systems. Their technology pairs perfectly with DigitalOcean’s philosophy of operational simplicity, predictable economics, and scalable performance. We are also proud to welcome Salman Paracha, co-founder and CEO of Katanemo Labs, as our new Senior Vice President of AI. His team’s deep expertise in model research and open-source infrastructure development will be instrumental as we accelerate our mission to provide developers with an agentic inference cloud for running AI in production. In 2025, the center of gravity in AI shifted from experimentation to production. As the industry moves toward real-world deployment, the hardest problems have shifted from model access and accuracy to the challenges of running reliable, safe, and observable systems at scale. 61% of developers view closing the gap between prototype and production as their single greatest challenge, as found in our Currents research report. McKinsey research shows that fewer than 10% of AI use cases ever make it past the pilot stage.