Companies I'm talking about

Chroma is the thing people actually reach for. Fifteen million downloads a month, 27,000 stars, and a place in 90,000+ codebases — not because anyone sold it to them, but because it is the shortest path from "I have documents" to "my model can find them." Now it is aiming at something bigger than retrieval: the memory layer agents run on. Jeff Huber and Anton Troynikov have built the rare piece of infrastructure developers describe with affection.

One base URL, hundreds of models, and cryptographic proof that nobody logged your prompt. TrustedRouter is a drop-in swap for the router Stripe just paid north of $7B for — except it is fully open source, publicly attested against its own source commits, and fail-closed by design. That combination unlocks the workloads everyone else has to route around: medicine, finance, corporate R&D. Joseph Perla is building it on effectively zero burn.